Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (; 27 July 1924 – 7 September 2018), was an Iranian-born painter, sculptor, and a professor of art. He has been described as the "pioneer of modern Iranian abstraction." Life and education Mohsen Vaziri was born on 27 July 1924 in Tehran, Qajar Iran. In 1943, after obtaining his diploma at the Agricultural Institute, he applied to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tehran University (now University of Tehran) and he attended for three years. During his years at university, he felt the influence of impressionism and post-impressionism, especially Van Gogh, in both subject matters and expressive forms. Career In 1952, his first solo exhibition was held at the Iran-America Society in Tehran. From 1955 to 1958, Vaziri left for Rome where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. During these years, coinciding with the birth of European Informalism and the American Action Painting, after studying and analysing new modern art movements. In the April of 1956 Vaziri had his first Italian exhibition, displaying his figurative paintings at the Portonovo Art Gallery in Rome. In the same year, he exhibited in Düsseldorf and Munich, in Germany. In 1957, a landmark year and a turning point in his artistic career, he attended Toti Scialoja’s classes at the Academy for six months and started experimenting with abstract art. Vaziri bonded and shared his path with now internationally-known artists who also attended Scialoja’s course (Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, Mohamed Melehi, Maria Pioppi, Mario Ceroli and amongst many others). They embraced the vibrant artistic and intellectual zeitgeist, meeting between via di Ripetta and Piazza del Popolo in Rome –“our Latin Quarter” as described by film director Mario Ricci. His first abstract works date back to 1956-1959 and they fit in perfectly with the search for materials and brushstrokes happening in contemporary movements. Between 1959 and 1960, he developed a vision of abstract art through experiments that are highly focused on materials. This led to the creation of some of his most powerful works: the sand paintings. These paintings were conceived in a playful moment in the spring of 1959 and Vaziri kept trying his hand at them for the following 3 years, until 1963. Different types of sand were applied to the canvas in their natural state or mixed with colour. This original concept grabbed the attention of Italian art critic Giulio Carlo Argan and Palma Bucarelli, director of the