Tehran gallery to unveil 32-meter teahouse painting

“When I became the owner of the 66 Gallery in 1974, I decided to design a teahouse painting to cover over the walls of the gallery, which are 32 meters in length,” veteran painter and collector Sadeq Tabrizi told the Persian service of ISNA on Saturday.

“I wanted subjects from the descent of Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad (S) up to today’s Islamic events to be depicted in the painting,” he added.

Tabrizi planned to invite naqqals, Iranian traditional storytellers, and pardeh-khans, the naqqals who narrates tragic stories of Muslim leaders, to have performances at the galley on the painting.

He asked renowned Iranian teahouse painter Abbas Bolukifar to design and draw the painting.

Bolukifar spent five years designing the painting. However, the work came to a halt after the victory of the Islamic revolution in 1979, because no attention was paid to artistic activities during that period, Tabrizi said.

“As proposed by Bolukifar, we decided to complete the painting with the depiction of Imam Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran in 1979, but the subject lost its freshness when it was not completed because of Bolukifar’s death,” he added.

Tabrizi said that another teahouse painter, Biuk Ahmari, resumed working on the painting in 1998 and finally completed it in 2003.

The descent of Gabriel, the ascendance of the Prophet Muhammad (S), the early Islamic battles, the Ashura event, and several other contemporary Islamic events have been depicted in the painting.

The artwork, which has been painted on canvas measuring 32x1.6 meter, will be unveiled by the end of the lunar month of Muharram on January 5, 2011.

Photo: Imam Hussein (AS) and his six-month-old son, Ali-Asghar (AS) have been depicted in a part of the painting.