A sculpture that has not been seen since the 1980s is on show at Ab-Anbar Gallery at Frieze Masters. Bahman Mohassess’s Faun Musician was first commissioned in 1971 by the Iranian queen Farah Pahlavi as one of two public sculptures for the plaza of the then newly built City Theatre of Tehran. Mohassess, an Iranian artist who had studied in Italy and was deeply influenced by Greek mythology, conceived of a nude faun playing a flute, with attenuated limbs and an energised male member.
As Mohassess recounts in a 2013 documentary, Fifi Howls From Happiness, the nudity—and its angle—was shocking even for the liberal Tehran of the period. A muslin cloth was placed over the offending section, but after a few months it blew away.
“The sculpture became a meeting point for couples. His view was, what else would you want to be known for?” says Salman Matinfar, the director of Ab-Anbar gallery, which moved from Tehran to London in 2020.
The religious government ushered in by the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not so receptive. Faun Musician was taken down and its whereabouts were unknown for 20 years. At the end of the 2000s a photograph surfaced of the sculpture, in pieces, in the basement of the Tehran Contemporary Art Museum. It has not been seen in public since.
The sculpture that is at Ab-Anbar stand is not for sale. Mohassess made three versions: the public sculpture in Iran; a miniature cast, in a private collection; and this third 1973 version, at 1.2m in height, which comes from a private Italian collection. It is on show in London for the first time since 1980.
“Mohassess was so different to other artists,” Matinfar says. “The art movements of the time wanted to modernise Iranian elements. But we didn’t have many figurative artists in the 1960s in Iran, who were concerned with the human condition.”
Mohassess is included in the Queering Modernism strand at Frieze Masters, a curated section put together by Anke Kempkes that looks at the often forgotten history of queer artists. Mohassess remains best known for his large-scale canvases—regularly showing male figures reclining together and outliers at the time—but his collages are equally impactful and often more explicit than the paintings.
• Frieze Masters, Regent's Park, London, until 18 October