Why Did Contemporary Iranian Art Sell for £200 in London This Month?

Twenty Tehran galleries, 200 works and one very important week

We all know the big names of Iranian modernism, from Sohrab Sepehri to Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, but how familiar are you with the artists working in Iran today? For one week this September, close to 200 of their works were on sale in central London, priced between £200 and £3,000. The question is: why so little?

The exhibition, A Present Tense: Contemporary Artists Living and Working in Iran, has just closed at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London, where it ran from 19 to 26 September 2026. It brought together around 100 artists living and working in Iran, with the participation of some 20 Iranian galleries and art spaces. The show was organised by Salman Matinfar, the London-based founding director of Ab-Anbar, together with Orkideh Daroodi, founder of O Gallery in Tehran. Founded in Tehran before opening its London space, Ab-Anbar has long been one of the most important bridges between Iran's art scene and the international art world, so it's no surprise that it was the gallery to take this on.

With flights disrupted and the region in turmoil, the organisers chose smaller works on paper, cardboard and textile to make them easier to transport, although shipping still cost more than expected. "We figured it was best to take the works to them," Daroodi told The Art Newspaper.

What's perhaps most moving is that galleries which usually compete with one another in Tehran pooled their inventory for the show. "There is an impression that Iranian galleries don't work together, and this was a good opportunity to show that this isn't true," says Daroodi. For Matinfar, the reason was simple: "The ecosystem includes the gallery, the artist, everyone is suffering." He added: "We want to show that art is a way of connecting people and this should never be stopped."

Now let's look at the numbers. On 30 April 2026, Sotheby's in London offered a gouache on paper by Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), Untitled (Still Life with Leaves), measuring 68.5 x 48.5cm, with a low estimate of £20,000. The same work had sold at Christie's in 2008 for USD 67,000. That's a low estimate almost seven times the highest price in a show of 200 works by 100 living artists.

That said, the secondary market for art from our region is hardly booming either. Bonhams' timed online sale of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art in London, which ran from 12 to 26 February 2026, totalled USD 286,800 (£212,300) against a combined low estimate of USD 474,200, with 34 of 55 lots sold, a sell-through rate of 62%. So the market is soft, but it still operates at many times what these contemporary artists could charge in London this month. Figures are reported in the currency of sale where available.

So is this a pricing problem or a plumbing problem? It's often said that sanctions lower the value of Iranian art. We're not sure that's quite what's happening here.

In fact, the value appears intact. Sepehri, Farhad Moshiri, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Parviz Tanavoli continue to be priced in hard currency in London, New York and Dubai. What has broken down is the route between a studio in Tehran and those prices. An artist working in Iran today struggles to invoice in dollars, to ship work reliably, to travel to their own openings or to receive payment through the international banking system.

What's more, the three things that usually give contemporary art a price are all harder to come by. Sustained gallery representation abroad relies on contracts and payments. An auction history relies on paperwork and clean title transfer. And institutional acquisitions rely on museums being able to pay through a bank. Take all three away, and £200 to £3,000 starts to look less like a valuation and more like a workaround.

We should be careful not to read this as a purely commercial story, because that would sell short what Matinfar and Daroodi achieved. This was, first and foremost, an act of solidarity, organised by dealers in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

However, it does leave collectors with an uncomfortable question. At these prices, anyone building a serious collection of contemporary Iranian art could have done so in a single week for less than the price of one mid-market modern work from elsewhere in the region. Is that the buying opportunity of the decade, or a market under duress that collectors should think carefully about? We suspect it's a little of both.

There's also a longer-term consequence worth noting. Prices set in London this September will become comparables. The next time a Tehran gallery tries to place one of these artists abroad, somebody will look up what their work sold for in 2026, and a figure set to support artists during a war may end up doing work it was never meant to do.

It would be easy to file this under Iran and move on, but the disruption has reached the whole MENA region this year. Art Dubai's twentieth edition was postponed from April to 15 to 17 May 2026, and the region's auction calendar has been shifting too, with Christie's set to hold its first fine art auction in Abu Dhabi on 1 November. Encouragingly, these are problems of infrastructure rather than demand, and infrastructure is something that can be built.

So, what can we take away from this? We'd love to see Ab-Anbar repeat the initiative, and to see it given a longer run than a single week. More importantly, we're eager to see which institution in our region will be the first to acquire from a show like this one and share the price it paid, because putting a real number on the record would be one of the most useful things anyone could do for these 100 artists. Here's hoping it happens soon.

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