Oh Nightingale: Parviz Tanavoli

Opening Reception: Tuesday, July 23, 7–9 p.m.

Curator’s Tour: Thursday, July 25, 1:30 p.m.

Curator's Tour: Saturday, September 14, 2 p.m. 

Film screening: Thursday, September 19, 6 p.m. Details. 

Culture Days: Farsi Exhibition Tour: Saturday, September 28, 10:30 a.m.

“My cages are homes of hopes. And I put a lot of things in the cages. It’s the opposite of what some people think: I do not consider what I put in cages imprisoned, but preserved, made safe.” Parviz Tanavoli, 1976

The West Vancouver Art Museum is delighted to present this exhibition of work by the eminent Iranian-Canadian artist, Parviz Tanavoli. A resident of West Vancouver for over three decades, Tanavoli is among Canada’s most significant contemporary artists. This exhibition will feature work that spans his six-decade career, focusing on his wearable art and small sculptures, prints and paintings of birds, cages and locks. The artist has returned repeatedly to these forms, allowing him to explore the themes of freedom, nothingness, poetry and history, while playing with his viewer’s awareness of traditional function and meaning. Just as he subverts the accepted meaning of a cage, he explores dualisms that manifest themselves as both significant and trivial, a poet contrasting the everyday with the remarkable.

Tanavoli was born in 1937. His work has been presented around the world and has been featured recently in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, Asia Society and Grey Art Gallery at New York University. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including: Tate Modern and British Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; Mathaf Museum, Qatar; Royal Society of Fine Arts, Amman; and Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi.