Complex, innovative and thought-provoking, Iranian art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries offers fresh insight into a culture and society that have been much misunderstood in the West and elsewhere. In this new, comprehensive study, featuring 379 full-colour images, Hamid Keshmirshekan considers the dynamics at play for Iranian artists as they confront their cultural past as well as issues of contemporaneity and cultural specificity. He contends that the twentieth century in particular proved a crucial period in the art and culture of Iran; it was then that the legacies of tradition and modernism came under critical review, and artistic concerns revealed themselves as indivisible from ideological ones. Contemporary Iranian Art includes major work by acclaimed Iranian artists such as Mahmoud Bakhshi, Shadi Ghadirian, Barbad Golshiri, Marcos Grigorian, Farhad Moshiri, Shirin Neshat, Sohrab Sepehri, Mitra Tabrizian, Parviz Tanavoli and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. Preface by Hala Khayat, Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art, Christie's.