Mehdi Ghadyanloo

Mehdi Ghadyanloo uses the illusionistic capacity of painting to make oneiric images with a powerful symbolic charge. Ranging from utopian urban scenes to enigmatic seascapes and playground slides, Ghadyanloo’s subjects are both familiar and uncanny. The drama of light, shade, and color and the artist’s careful attention to perspectival construction unite his precisely rendered paintings, works on paper, and public murals, which employ a broadly accessible visual language with a metaphysical edge.

Ghadyanloo was born in Karaj, Iran, in 1981, and grew up during the Iran–Iraq War, in which his father was a soldier. He began his studies in art by learning traditional miniature painting, which was the only art instruction available to him. He subsequently graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in painting from the University of Tehran and a master’s degree in animation from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran. While still a student in 2004, he answered an open call from Tehran’s Beautification Bureau for muralists. Over the subsequent decade, he completed over one hundred murals across the city, replacing the propagandistic images that had dominated it since Iran’s Islamic Revolution with public art intended to beautify the urban environment and promote environmentalism and civic harmony.