Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, located on the north side of Keshavarz Boulevard and west of Laleh Park in Tehran. The Museum of Contemporary Art is the center of important Iranian artistic activities and events in the field of visual arts. The museum includes the most important and comprehensive collection of Western art on the Asian continent at the time of its founding. According to the museum’s official definition, the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibits how contemporary art evolved over a limited period of time. The Museum of Contemporary Art has one of the most complete collections of abstract expressionist art in the world.
In addition to the valuable assets, the complex and unique plan of the building is another factor that has put the museum on the list of remarkable buildings in the world.
The museum building, which is one of the most valuable and rare examples of modern Iranian architecture, is inspired by traditional Iranian architecture and its philosophical concepts.
The museum building is a combination of modern and traditional architecture, inspired by windmills in the desert areas of Iran. The Museum of Contemporary Art is a combination of nine nested galleries. Passing through the main door of the museum, you enter a large space that leads from the middle to the lower floor of the museum with a circular slope. This slope is your way back to the same gallery to exit after visiting the museum.
Beautiful and valuable statues of contemporary artists such as Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and Parviz Tanavoli have turned the surrounding green space into a sculpture park.
The permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran consists of nearly 3,000 valuable and unique works that belong to the elites of the visual arts of Iran and the world. These include works by renowned artists such as Renoir, Lautrec, Gauguin, Picasso, Max Ernst, and Magritte. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is one of the top museums of contemporary art in the world, with a market value of more than $ 2.5 billion. The museum’s collection is exceptional in the world because it covers all the artistic movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
A spectacular collection of British and American pop and photorealist artists, as well as abstract artifacts by Jackson Pollack, Klein, and Sweezy, are among the more modern works. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran also has works by Bacon, Hackney, Kitaj, Do Buffet, and Johnson.
Photographs of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran include at least 120 photographs by foreign photographers such as Henry Fox Talbot, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans.
In the museum’s library, thousands of titles of Persian and non-Persian books in architecture, painting, drawing, visual communication, photography, film industry, and other artistic fields have been collected. Library books are classified and cataloged using the LC (Library of Congress) method, and information about each book is reflected in the component, title, and subject pages.
The Museum of Contemporary Art also has several side sections, including cinematheque, a specialized bookstore, and a restaurant. Cinematheque started in October 1998. The specialty bookstore is on the left side of the entrance hall to the galleries, where Iranian art magazines sell examples of works by Iranian writers, chronologies, art postcards, and works published by the Institute of Visual Arts. The museum’s restaurant is also on the ground floor of the entrance. A glass wall separates it from the statue garden, and you can watch statues of a horse, a Marine rider, a Magritte therapist, a standing woman, and a walking man.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran collaborates with artists and other museums of contemporary art in the world and exchanges artworks with them. These collaborations include holding periodic exhibitions of works by foreign artists or entrusting the museum’s valuable works to other cultural institutions. The museum’s partnership includes lending a Trinidad Fernandez painting to the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 2010.