Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: Group Presentation

Ali-Akbar Sadeghi (b. 1937, Tehran) is a renowned visual artist who started painting at an early age. He graduated with a BA from the College of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran in 1969. He worked as a graphic designer (posters, book covers, packaging) for many years before joining the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents (CIDCA) in 1971. CIDCA was a thriving center for creative work, and Sadeghi directed his attention to making animations and illustrating books.

Inspired by the folk culture of Iran, his lively, spirited canvases and illustrations are where modern and ancient aesthetics coincide.

In 1991, at the 25th anniversary of CIDCA, Sadeghi was honored for his outstanding book illustration and filmmaking achievements. In 2009, the Iranian Ministry of Culture (Ershad) recognized Sadeghi as "an outstanding cultural figure and contributor to Iranian art and culture.” Ali-Akbar Sadeghi has held 12 solo exhibitions in Iran and worldwide, including "A Retrospective" in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018. His works have appeared in numerous group exhibitions since 1984. He participated in the Singapore Biennale (2019). Dastan Gallery showed two works of the artist in "Soft Edge of the Blade" at Frieze's No. 9 Cork Street in February 2022 and at all the three exhibitions of “Mosavarnameh” between 2015 and 2018. Drawings and paintings of Sadeghi are held by many art institutions, including the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Andisheh Avini (b. 1974, New York) is an artist who uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, often incorporating the traditional craft of marquetry in his artistic practice.

Andisheh Avini explores the duality of his own identity by combining iconic images like Persian calligraphy, decorative motifs, and portraiture with occidental concepts of minimalism and abstraction. Avini's approach speaks to a larger globalized society of nomads, the displaced, and the wayfarer, reflecting a contemporary multicultural experience to which many can relate.

Fereydoun Ave (b. 1945, Tehran, Iran) is an influential figure in Iranian contemporary art. He received his BA in Applied Arts for Theatre from Arizona State University (1964), studied Film at New York University (1969), and attended the University of Seven Seas (aka Semester at Sea, 1964). Over the past five decades, he has taken on many roles as an artist, designer, art director, collector, curator, gallerist, and art patron.

The art of Fereydoun Ave is a freehanded engagement with a personal ethos informed by more prominent cultural influences. He ceaselessly reflects on his relationship with age, myths, plants, elements, seasons, moods, and heredity. He takes inspiration from the art of Iran, which tends to use the entire canvas surface, and the Western penchant for minimalism, which leaves large swaths unattended. Fereydoun Ave's joint projects with artists, galleries (including Dastan), and institutions are an integral part of his practice, reflecting his role as a curator, gallerist, and collector.

Homa Delvaray (b. 1980, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian graphic designer and visual artist living and working in Tehran. Since earning a degree in Visual Communication from the University of Tehran (2006), she has extended her work across mediums, from installation to sculpture, textile art to artist books.

Her practice activates the overlap of graphic and stage design in a spatial framework. Her works, often presented as an installation of a group of objects, engage the architectural space using a combination of design and spatial strategies. A graphic designer by training, Delvaray employs the tools she has at her disposal to research and present what she observes as the paradoxical life within the dichotomies found in the life of contemporary Iranians. Her recent series investigates gender relations and how it has been formulated in mythological metaphors and tropes.

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (1924 – 2018) is acknowledged as a pioneer of Iranian abstractionism and a leading figure in developing contemporary Iranian art. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He was also an educator, opening the way for many to-be artists to go beyond the limits of established ways. His "Drawing Method and Painting Guide" (1981) is today's standard academic text. 

He is widely recognized for works spanning five decades, from the painterly abstracts of the 1960s to the hard-edged geometry of the sculpted and painted aluminum wall reliefs of his later years. Vaziri's work is characterized by a restless experimentation of form through materials -- deployed in his drawings, sand paintings, opto-kinetic sculptures, and painted aluminum wall reliefs.

Pooya Aryanpour (b. 1971, Tehran, Iran) is an artist, art instructor, and university lecturer based in Tehran. He studied Painting at Azad University of Tehran, where he obtained his M.A. in 1999. He has been an active artist, instructor, and curator over the past three decades.

Since the 2000s, Pooya Aryanpour has made use of mirrors in his sculptures, a practice made popular by artist Monir Farmanfarmaian in the early 1970s. Aryanpour's studies of Qajar's (19th-20th centuries) mirror works have given his work a reflective character. His works can also be considered interactive and conceptual as they fleetingly reflect the image of their viewers. Large size sculptures are covered with tiny mirrors that change color with a shift in lighting, multiplying what they reflect. The plurality of images thus reflected has a spiritual dimension – mirror works are used in places of worship throughout Iran. The multiplicity of images shatters the individual's ego to arrive at a devotional unity. Aryanpour has been created from many materials and in abstract form in widely different sizes.

His work has been extensively exhibited, both in Iran and at international biennials, gallery shows, art fairs, and institutional exhibitions, namely the sculpture biennial in Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (2017), Sophia Contemporary Gallery (London, 2016), and "Gone with the Wind" (Kahrizad Sugar Factory, Tehran, 2022).