Maxxi Museum in Rome to Show Persian Art

A part of the treasured collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA) will be displayed at the Maxxi Museum in Rome, Italy, in January 2017.

Following a memorandum of cooperation in the fields of art, culture and tourism signed by President Hassan Rouhani and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi during the latter's visit to Tehran in April, Maxxi, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, will host the collection for four months, ISNA reported.

Similar to Iran’s three-month art exhibition in Berlin that opened in November 2015, the Rome event will display 60 items from the Tehran museum’s treasury of artworks, including 30 by Iranian artists and 30 by foreigners.

Maxxi is the first Italian national institution devoted to contemporary art creativity. The Tehran museum is said to have the most valuable collection of western modern and contemporary art outside Europe and the US. It is home to an estimated $3.7 billion worth of modern art.

The TMOCA has more than 4,000 items that include 19th and 20th century world-class Iranian, European and American paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, including an impressive collection of artworks by great Iranian artists Manoucher Yektai, Sohrab Sepehri and Faramarz Pilaram as well as western artists Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko, among others.

The museum occasionally organizes art expos as well. An exhibition of Iranian and Arab modern art will be held early November at the museum. The event will showcase a number of works by Iranian artists and a set of modern works by Arab artists.

This is the first time some works of Arab art will be shown in Iran. The exhibit with remarkable works by leading artists of Iran and the Arab world will provide an opportunity to review the position and role of art in the region and compare Iran and Arab modern art in the past and present.