Bahman Mohassess: Human Assemblage

Bahman Mohassess conceived his lifelong experimentation with collage as “assemblage”–an extension of the fractured figuration and charged materiality that shaped his paintings and sculptures. This publication repositions his assemblages as a radical laboratory of artistic, intellectual, and political engagement. Essays by leading scholars and curators explore how Mohassess negotiated exile, sexuality, modernism, and dissent across postwar Iran, Central Europe, and Rome. Far from peripheral, these works emerge as central to understanding Mohassess’s distinct visual language and his complex position as a transnational queer artist navigating the cultural and political realities of the twentieth century.

Born in Rasht, Iran in 1931, Bahman Mohassess was a multidisciplinary Iranian artist, translator and theatre director, who spent most of his life in Rome, dying there in 2010. His oeuvre includes paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages and collages.