Mehdi Ghadyanloo

A farm in Karaj

Mehdi Ghadyanloo was born in Karaj, a city west of Tehran, in 1981, the son of a farmer and a carpet weaver. He grew up during the war between Iran and Iraq, in which his father served as a soldier, and he lived and worked on the family farm until he was eighteen. He then enrolled in the Fine Arts faculty of the University of Tehran to study painting, graduating four years later, and afterwards took a master's degree in animation at Tarbiat Modares University.

A hundred walls in Tehran

His career began with an open call. The municipal bureau responsible for beautifying Tehran invited submissions, he sent concepts, they were approved, and he began painting the blank concrete flanks of buildings across the capital. Over roughly seven years he completed more than a hundred murals in the city, most of them built on trompe l'oeil: staircases climbing into nothing, ladders leaning against open sky, children reaching for balloons on walls that suddenly appear to have depth. The scale of that commission would be unusual anywhere, and it made him the most prolific public artist Iran has produced.

The press reached for a convenient handle and called him Iran's answer to Banksy. He has consistently rejected the comparison. His own references are European: the empty arcaded squares of Giorgio de Chirico, the quiet dislocations of Magritte, and the stripped geometry of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier above all. The murals are commissioned and municipal rather than illicit, which puts them at some distance from street art as the term is usually understood.

Gallery and the wider world

He showed Mirage of Redemption at Gallery GEO in Bergen in 2014. His first British exhibition, Perception, opened at the Howard Griffin Gallery in London in 2015 and sold out before the doors opened; he painted several walls in the city at the same time, including one in Shoreditch.

Public commissions abroad followed. In 2016 he painted a mural across a wall of more than five thousand square feet opposite South Station in Boston for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which made him the first Iranian artist commissioned in both Iran and the United States since the revolution. In 2017 he staged Spaces of Hope in a vast London venue and showed Remembering the Oblivion at Rod Bianco in Oslo. In 2018 the Howard Griffin Gallery presented Undercurrents in Basel; the same year he completed Rebuilding the Sky in Almetyevsk in Russia with a small team of muralists from his hometown, and painted The Fraud and Hope on the roof of the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, a huge water swirl and a gaping black hole addressing melting ice, migration and his own phobias.

In 2019 he showed Portals of Light at Galleri Golsa in Oslo and was commissioned by the World Economic Forum to make a large painting, Finding Hope, for its annual meeting. In 2020 his work appeared at The Armory Show in New York with Dastan's Basement. The band Phish later used one of his paintings for an album cover.

The studio paintings

The canvases are quieter than the walls. They keep the murals' architecture, the flat planes of colour, the deep perspective and the single small figure set against something vast, but they trade the public joke for something closer to melancholy. Recurring motifs include tunnels, doorways, hovering spheres, ramps that lead nowhere and the skies that give several works their titles. Critics have compared the paintings to Le Corbusier for their reduction of building to pure geometry, and others have called him a Magritte of our times.

New Sky, the print catalogued here, belongs to this side of the practice rather than to the mural commissions, and it made well above its high estimate in this saleroom.