Iran’s branch of International Animated Film Association is to commemorate veteran painter and illustrator Ali Akbar Sadeghi and show his short animations at Iranian Artists Forum on August 19.
The 81-year-old visual artist has worked on a wide range of artistic mediums throughout his carrier including design and illustration of six animations during the 1970s that he directed and were produced by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.
Also featured in the upcoming event is a reviewing session after the screening of his short animated films “Seven Cities,” “Flower Storm,” “Boasting,” “The Rook,” “The Sun King,” and “Zal and Simorgh,” ISNA reported on its Persian website.
The stories in his animations are based on folklore or stories of Shahnameh (Book of Kings) by Persian poet Ferdowsi (940-1020).
Sadeghi’s style in animation includes elements of traditional Persian miniature paintings and avant-garde movement of surrealism.
Surrealism, founded by the poet André Breton in Paris in 1924, was an artistic and literary movement, where artists like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte have painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision or created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that expressed unconscious thoughts reality.
Sadeghi has held 25 exhibitions in and outside Iran and published seven books. The artist is mostly famous for his traditional Persian iconography that indeed made him a master of Persian surrealism. International Animated Film Association is an international non-profit organization founded in 1960 in Annecy, France. There are now more than 30 branches of the association around the world.
