The leading Iranian artist Iran Darroudi is funding a new museum due to open in the Yousef Abad neighbourhood of Tehran. The ground-breaking ceremony took place earlier this month on Darroudi’s 80th birthday. According to the Financial Tribune website, the new museum is scheduled to open in 18 months.
City officials donated a plot of land for the new building, which will double up as a cultural and education centre. “Darroudi has donated 195 of her pieces from the 1960s to today, to be permanently exhibited in the museum,” a project spokeswoman says.
According to her website, Darroudi studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Imperial and Royal Academy in Brussels. In 1969, she was commissioned by the conglomerate ITT group to paint the Abadan-Mahshahr oil pipeline.
Darroudi is also credited with kick-starting the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. In the late 1970s, the late shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, championed the acquisition of Modern art from the West and backed the founding of the Tehran museum.
Pahlavi told the Guardian in 2012: “I remember Mrs Darroudi telling me she wished we had a place where we could put our works on show permanently, that was how the idea for Tehran's museum of contemporary art came up.”
Cultural initiatives are, meanwhile, gathering momentum in Iran: works drawn from the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation collection are due to go on show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art this winter (8 November-23 December), while the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has unveiled plans for a museum in the historic oasis city of Kashan.