Aesthetic Developments in Iranian Painting of the 80s

More than 80 years after the beginning of the modernist movement in Iran’s painting which according to Mojabi begins in 1936. Iranian painting witnessed significant developments due to social, political, and economic conditions. With the Islamic revolution in the 80s, Iranian painting underwent a sweeping change. The rapid pace of important developments, such as the "Islamic Revolution" and the "Iran-Iraq War" caused Iranian painters to have not enough opportunities to hypothesize and theorize. With the occurrence of these two events in Iran, the pre-Islamic revolution art movements stopped for a while. New conditions demanded new aesthetic structures that the pre-Islamic revolution movements did not meet those needs. In the meantime, new and young artists emerged as well. In addition, a number of old artists produced works in line with the new developments and conditions, the totality of the works produced under the new circumstances were indicative of a new perspective on the structure and content of the Iranian painting.This attitude in painting is known as "revolution painting." Four decades have passed since the beginning of these developments, now is a good time to criticize this attitude. How did the Islamic revolution and its subsequent events (e.g., the Iran-Iraq war and its end) alter the Iranian painting of the 80s and how did the aesthetic structures of the produced works in the 80s differ from those of earlier times? The present study aimed to answer this question. Regarding the background of the current research, Tabasi and Ansari (2006) in a research entitled as "A study of the content and form in painting of the first decade of the Islamic revolution" attempted to examine the content and structure of the paintings of the 80s and review the theorists' views, including "Mustafa Goodarzi", "Morteza Goodarzi", "Zahra Rahnavard", and others sought to categorize these works in terms of content and form; however, form analysis only examines the style of these works.