James Leon |
Tehran (EFE).- Bulls, religion, flamenco and the Alhambra. This is how Iranian artists perceive Spain, as shown by an exhibition of paintings on the Iberian country in Tehran, which seeks to bring the two nations closer through culture.
The exhibition “Reflections of Spain” is a look at the European nation by 18 Iranian painters organized by the Spanish Embassy in Tehran and which will remain open until the middle of this month.
The artists -nine men and nine women- have never set foot in Spain and they were asked to paint a picture with that country in mind to show it at the prestigious Iran Artists Forum in the Iranian capital.
The result is 18 works in which references to the Alhambra, flamenco, bullfights and Holy Week abound.
“I love Spanish music. I adore flamenco”, the painter Golbarg Shabani, author of a surreal canvas that shows pieces of a dancer’s costume and a hand making the recognizable flamenco gesture, explains to EFE.
Flamenco and bullfights, the best known aspects
Shabani acknowledges that flamenco and bullfighting are perhaps the best known aspects of Spanish culture in Iran, aside from soccer, although there were no paintings about the sport in the exhibition.
The painter Niusha Niujpour also opted for dance in her work “The Victory Dance” in which a group of people dance as they approach a huge light that looks like a sun.
Another painting shows Nazarenes and Jesus Christ on the Cross, the work of Razieh Iranpour.
The work that perhaps aroused the most praise was a tribute to “El 3 de mayo en Madrid” or “Los fusilamientos” by Francisco de Goya. In Mehdi Alainejad’s work, the man in the white shirt with his arms raised appears in the center, in a clear reference to Goya’s painting.
The curator of the exhibition is the renowned painter Hamid Pazoki, 68, who studied in the 1980s at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid.
“I learned to see in Spain,” explains Pazoki, who speaks perfect Spanish.
His experience in the Spanish capital “opened his mind” and now with the exhibition in Tehran he wants to show Spain in Iran.
Bring Iran and Spain closer
The aim of the cultural event is to bring Iran and Spain closer, to unite the two peoples.
“The first objective is to bring the two peoples closer through painting and culture,” the Spanish ambassador in Tehran, Ángel Losada, told EFE.
“And the second objective is to see how Iranian artists perceive Spanish culture, how they perceive our country, what its soul is, and thanks to that, culture, to unite the two peoples”, he explains.
And it is that Spain has maintained relations with Iran that go back at least 400 years, but it does not let it be a distant friendship due to the sporadic contacts throughout the centuries.
In recent years, cultural initiatives have been carried out to alleviate this lack of contacts.
An example is the book “An old friendship: four hundred years of historical and cultural relations between Iran and the Hispanic world”, a collaboration between the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Allame Tabatabaí University, which was presented in 2022.
This collection of 17 essays by Spanish and Iranian academics studies the historical and cultural relations between the Persian country and the Hispanic world from political, literary and artistic points of view.
Also last year, a Spanish-Persian dictionary was published, the second bilingual glossary between these languages and the first with a pronunciation guide.
“It is a basic instrument to strengthen the relationship between the two peoples,” Losada said in his presentation.