One of Iran’s most celebrated modern artists, Bahman Mohassess was a prolific painter, sculptor, and set designer as well as a translator and theater director. Born in the Caspian region, Mohassess began studying painting as a teenager and soon thereafter joined an avant-garde movement of literary and visual artists in Tehran. He remained active there until the fall of Mosaddegh in 1953 when he moved to Rome, which remained his home for the majority of his life until his death in 2010. During the Islamic Revolution, most of the public works by Mohassess were destroyed, while the artist himself subsequently destroyed all of his remaining works in Iran. Mohassess also created collages using images from newspapers and magazines, which he referred to as assemblages. While the first of these were created as early as the 1970s, he returned to this medium increasingly in his later years, often taking up the same themes as his paintings and sculptures; five such assemblages are included in LACMA’s permanent collection.
The still life, with objects both real and imaginary, is a recurrent subject for Mohassess in his paintings and collages alike. Here he takes up the classic genre and undoes it: the composition and varied textures make it recognizable as a still life, but the shapes are abstracted to merely hint at their existence as fruits, vegetables, and possibly a fish. The background glows a faded yellow, but a closer look reveals an image that might be recognizable to some. It is the Tate Modern’s great Turbine Hall, during a commissioned exhibition titled The Weather Project (2003) in which the artist Olafur Eliasson created an artificial sun, sky, and atmosphere. With this image choice, Mohassess weaves additional references to nature and artificiality into the fabric of his still life, a genre already known to complicate the distinction between reality and illusion.
