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In 1945, Fereydoun Ave was born in Tehran into a Zoroastrian family with origins from Yazd. At the age of eight he was sent to a boarding school in England. When he was eighteen, he enrolled in Agricultural Engineering at Arizona State University. He became leader of the cultural sector of the Associated Students of Arizona State University (ASASU), and organized cultural events such as films, plays, musical performances and exhibitions. After two years he changed his course of study to “Applied Arts for Theatre” as per the advice of the president of the university. Meanwhile, Ave performed and directed plays, and designed theatre posters, brochures, lighting, costumes, and sets. His conception of theatre was directly influenced by Iranian art.

Rather than illustrating, he designed posters by putting together a set of pictures gathered from here and there. In a time where illustrators were the stars of the graphics world, Ave was a true graphic designer. His treatment of the typography and the arrangement of type was influenced by the dominant atmosphere of the 1960s in New York. After Arizona, Ave studied “Film Aesthetics” at New York University for one year. A short film in three acts based on a song by Bob Dylan is the fruit of this period.

In 1970, Fereydoun Ave returned to Iran after eighteen years and became Douglas James Johnson’s assistant in the Iran-America Society’s cultural center. He pursued applied designs for theatre, film banners, and exhibitions of Hossein Zenderoudi, Ardeshir Mohasses, Marcos Grigorian, Parviz Tanavoli, and many others. It was here he gained his first experiences with Persian letterforms, and since he could not read and write in Persian, he played with the letters very easily with no restriction. Unlike the influence of Marxist insights on Iran’s then-present graphics, there was no slogan or commitment in his works; he was engaged in his own personal sensitivities and obsessions. The design of a catalogue reviewing the works of Ardeshir Mohasses reflects his attention towards various types of paper — the visual quality of the letters, vanishing from the horizon line, and rejection of the effect of gravity in composition.

Eventually Ave was called into military service and sent to work in the Theatre Workshop affiliated with National Iranian Radio and Television. The Theatre Workshop’s mission “aims at helping the writers, actors, directors, and designers examine themselves and gain experiences far from the common boundaries of the theatre profession.” Here, Ave designed theatre posters, brochures, sets, and costumes. The Theatre Workshop’s plays were performed in Kalantari Alley, Yousef Abad Street, the City Theatre, and the Shiraz Arts Festival. During this period, Ave designed a poster for the play The Cherry Orchard, directed by Arby Ovanessian, which was the program for the City Theatre’s inauguration. Working in the Theatre Workshop was the longest period of Fereydoun Ave’s design activity in Iran. The Theatre Workshop provided the possibility for new experiences for him and his friends, such as Assurbanipal Babilla, Abbas Nalbandian, Shahrou Kheradmand, and Arby Ovanessian.

In 1973, he designed the poster and invitation for the 7th Shiraz Arts Festival, commissioned by Bijan Saffari. That same year, he designed and published the book Ceremonies by Ardeshir Mohasses and proposed a book design for the 100th birthday of Maurice Ravel to Rudaki Hall, which was printed and published. He published a poster on a gray and green graph paper background for his personal exhibition in Litho Gallery and painted on each poster with chalk pastel, turning them into unique works of art.

In 1976, Homa Zand proposed he become the art director and organizer of the Zand gallery. In designing the gallery’s logo, Ave was inspired by the common method of writing names under the portraits of Qajar kings. He designed the invitation card and catalogue on graph paper, as he liked the ability to create disorder on an orderly background. He silk screened some artist’s work from some Zand gallery exhibitions, which became available to the audience. Throughout his two and a half years of work in this gallery, Ave organized and designed exhibitions for twenty-two artists, including Parviz Tanavoli, Kamran Diba, Tony Shafrazi, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Bijan Saffari, Leili Matin Daftari, and Paul Jenkins. 

After the 1979 revolution, Ave left Iran and stayed in Paris for ten years. He then returned to Iran and transformed the swimming pool of his house into an exhibition of his designs for furniture, interior design, and art work, with the architecture of Reza Daneshmir. He designed the Amiri family villa, the Besharat family house, and Dariush Shayegan’s office. In these years, Kaveh Najmabadi and Farhad Moshiri collaborated with him. He allocated a small place in his backyard to displaying art works, called “13 Vanak Street” and mounted several exhibitions there until the mid-1980s. While digital print had entered Iran and had become prevalent, Fereydoun Ave designed and printed the invitation cards of 13 Vanak Street exhibitions with lead letters on gray pasteboard.

Today, Ave still designs occasionally. His latest graphic design work is a poster designed this year for the “Seven artists for a new day” exhibition in Azad Art Gallery. During the last two years, he has designed the installation of “The In-between Space” and “Magic of Persia” exhibitions in Dubai. Ave has recently been on the move in Iran, France, Greece, and the UAE. He is involved in painting, photography, and sculpture, and his works are kept in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Swiss Lloyds Bank, Cy Twombly Foundation in the United States, and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.