Ab-Anbar Gallery presents Rome–Tehran: Parallel Avantgardes, a group exhibition co-curated by Salman Matinfar and Piero Tomassoni. The exhibition brings together artists from Italy and Iran who were active contemporaries in Rome between the 1950s and the 1970s, offering a comparative reading of parallel modernist developments across two different cultural contexts.

The selection includes Carla Accardi, Afro, Luigi Boille, Alberto Burri, and Mirko from Italy, alongside Bahman Mohasses, Behjat Sadr, Parviz Tanavoli, Marcos Grigorian, and Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddam from Iran. Although these artists shared a temporal and geographic proximity during parts of their careers, their practices emerged from distinct historical, cultural, and artistic conditions.

Rather than presenting a unified narrative of avant-garde art, the exhibition focuses on the idea of simultaneity and divergence. It suggests that avant-garde movements should not be understood as a single linear progression, but as multiple, parallel formations responding independently to the crisis of inherited artistic form in the postwar period.

Through painting, sculpture, and material experimentation, the works in the exhibition highlight different approaches to abstraction, figuration, and surface. While the Italian and Iranian artists developed within separate traditions, their works reveal points of resonance as well as difference when viewed within the shared context of mid-20th-century Rome.

Rome–Tehran: Parallel Avantgardes ultimately frames modernism as a network of intersecting yet autonomous trajectories, emphasizing how distinct artistic languages can evolve simultaneously while addressing similar historical tensions.