Situated in the heart of Tehran, adjacent to the huge Laleh Park, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the largest art museums in Asia, attracts art lovers from all over the world. According to art historians, this museum has the most extensive and valuable collection of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America.
The museum was inaugurated in 1977. Since then, the collection has expanded significantly: at the moment it has over 3000 items, 400 of which are considered works of exceptional value.
The museum has a permanent collection and it holds numerous temporary exhibitions; some of the museum's paintings are exhibited only occasionally. But in 2004, the museum administration decided to put on display all the works of art available in the archive. This large-scale exhibition was called جنبش (movement in Persian).
The museum's most valuable Western paintings are Mural on Indian Red Ground by Jackson Pollock, Painter and Model by Pablo Picasso, At Eternity's Gate by Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Head-Shaped Vase and Japanese Woodcut by Paul Gauguin and Girl with lovelock by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In addition, the museum has paintings by hundreds of other artists, including Claude Monet, Vasily Kandinsky, Edgar Degas, Diego Rivera.
The museum building is a piece of art in itself - it was designed by famous Iranian architect Kamran Diba, who used some elements of traditional Persian architecture in a modern way. The towers above the main building of the museum resemble barchans, lurking in the Laleh Park greenery.
At first glance, the museum building seems small for storing so many pieces of art - but most of the museum area is located underground, many meters deep. Sculptures by famous European sculptors such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte can be found in the museum's gardens.
The museum offers an array of changing exhibitions, often artists from Iran from other countries bring their paintings here to temporary exhibitions - you feel life and movement here, and even when you visit it again you will definitely find something new.
