Fereydoun Ave is one of the most influential figures in Iranian contemporary art, whose practice encompasses painting, collage, assemblage, design, and curation.

Drawing on personal memory, cultural inheritance, mythology, and the natural world, Ave creates works that move freely between abstraction and figuration, bringing together fragments, gestures, images, and materials in an intuitive and highly personal visual language.

His work is informed by a wide range of references, from Persian mythology and the epic narratives of the Shahnameh to plants, seasons, everyday objects, and personal experience. Rather than treating these elements as fixed symbols, Ave reinterprets them through layering, repetition, fragmentation, and painterly gesture. His long-standing interest in experimentation allows different media and forms to coexist, creating works that are at once intimate, poetic, and richly associative.

Ave studied Applied Arts for Theatre at Arizona State University and Film at New York University before returning to Iran in 1970. Since then, he has played a significant role in the development of Iran’s contemporary art scene, working across art, theatre, design, curating, and collecting. His contribution extends beyond his own practice through his support of generations of Iranian artists and through the influential independent art space 13 Vanak, which he established in Tehran in the early 1980s.

Ave’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major collections including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cy Twombly Foundation.