A painting by Iranian postwar artist Bahman Mohassess will be auctioned in this month. The painting will be sold during the Sotheby’s upcoming cross-category London sale titled “Modern Renaissance,” alongside works by Edvard Munch, David Hockney, and Arshile Gorky.
The painting, titled Minotauro sulla riva del mare (1977) , is coming to the auction for the first time under the joint-ownership of the artist’s estate, run by his heirs Leyla and Rooja Mohassessy and the Italy-based Bruni family, which has held the work for three decades. The painting is estimated to fetch around £350,000–£450,000 ($488,100–$627,600).
The work was formerly owned by Mohassess’s close friend, Francesco Bruni, who assisted the artist in making bronze sculptures and ran the Italian art studio, the Bruni foundry. Mohassess “deserves to be in a global international auction,” Baghestani said.
The painter, Mohassess, took his inspiration from Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti; his anthropomorphic figures have also been compared to Francis Bacon. The reclusive artist moved to Rome in the late 1960s, following an American-backed coup ousting Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
In Italy, the artist derived his inspiration from Cubism, Surrealism, and Greek mythology, and combined them with his own Iranian heritage. His art of the era was able to depict nude figures and erotic subject matter—something which would have been taboo in his home country during the 1960s-70s, according to Baghestani. Works such as Minotauro sulla riva del mare, which depicts the Surrealist-favored minotaur character, rarely come to auction.
The market of Mohassess painting grew in the recent years after European institutions began paying more attention to his art. In 2014,his work was included in the exhibition “Unedited History” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Mohassess’s 1968 work Requiem Omnibus (Death of Martin Luther King) depicting a macabre figurative painting made in reaction to the death of the civil rights leader, sold for $755,000, setting a record price for the artist.
Despite all of the interest in the artist works, Mohassess painting coming up for an auction is a very rare event because many of his work’s location are still unknown. “It is probably the most important event of my young career, but also in the market for Iranian artists,” Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s head of sales and director for Middle Eastern and contemporary art, said. “It’s a big deal in our market.”