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Tehran exhibition celebrates enduring legacy of Palestinian painter Suleiman Mansour
Iran opened an exhibition featuring 17 works by the late Palestinian painter Suleiman Mansour in Tehran on Sunday, honoring the enduring artistic legacy of one of the most influential figures in contemporary Palestinian art.
‘Painter of the Wounded Land,’ curated by Mohammadreza Vahidzadeh, opened at the Art Bureau’s Ali Gallery and brings together selected works that explore Palestinian land, memory, identity and everyday life through Mansour’s distinctive visual language.
Mansour, who died in Jerusalem on Aug. 24 at the age of 79, spent more than five decades developing an artistic vocabulary deeply rooted in Palestinian landscape, heritage and lived experience. His work became widely recognized for transforming elements of the natural environment and traditional culture into powerful visual motifs.
Vahidzadeh, the exhibition’s curator, said the presentation grew out of research on Palestinian art and Mansour’s work. The exhibition was organized alongside a specialized discussion examining different artistic, cultural and social dimensions of his oeuvre.
Some of the works on display have complicated histories. Four originals are held by Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, but access to them proved difficult, prompting organizers to produce high-quality reproductions for the exhibition.
Many other original works have also been separated from the artist over the years. Some were lost or stolen, while others were destroyed amid the difficult conditions surrounding Palestinian cultural life.
Mansour’s own circumstances left a strong imprint on his artistic practice. Vahidzadeh noted that the painter frequently moved from one exhibition to another under conditions in which artworks had to be transported quickly. This led him to work in smaller formats that could be carried with relative ease.
His choice of materials also became an important part of his artistic vocabulary. At one point, Mansour and fellow artists decided to stop using Israeli-made art supplies and turned instead to locally available materials, including henna, plants and burnt wood.
Clay eventually became particularly significant to his work. Mansour had grown up in a village surrounded by the material and began incorporating mud into his paintings. As the clay dried, cracked and deteriorated, he initially regarded the changes as a problem. He later recognized their artistic potential.
The cracks became part of the image itself, evoking the fragility, endurance and passage of time embedded in Palestinian life.
Mansour’s use of indigenous materials was part of a broader artistic shift that helped establish a distinctly Palestinian visual vocabulary. Art institutions and museums have noted his use of clay, straw, chalk, natural dyes and other materials drawn from the local environment.
“He never gave up art,” Vahidzadeh said, describing Mansour’s persistence through years of upheaval and uncertainty.
The curator also described the painter as a major cultural figure whose work offers an essential reference point for understanding contemporary Palestinian visual culture.
“Anyone seeking to understand the life of the contemporary Palestinian must turn to Suleiman Mansour’s works,” he said.
Mansour’s artistic legacy extends well beyond the region. His works are held by major international collections, including the British Museum, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Institut du Monde Arabe. He received the Palestine Prize for Visual Arts and the Grand Nile Prize in 1998 and the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2019.
The Tehran exhibition runs through October 14 at Ali Gallery of the Art Bureau.