Aydin Aghdashloo is an Iranian painter, graphist, writer, film critic. Aghdashloo was decorated with the Chevalier award, by the French government for his civil achievements.
Biography
Aydin Aghdashloo, son of Mohammad-Beik Aghdashloo and Nahid Nakhjevan, was born on October 30, 1940 in the Afakhray neighborhood of Rasht, Iran. His father was a Caucasian-Azerbaijani and a member of the Equality Caucasian Party and his family assumes their surname from the small town of Agdash. After seeing Aydin's talent in painting at school and his hand-made models, Mohammad-Beik took him to Habib Mohammadi, a painter and a teacher from Rasht. Aghdashloo's aunt and her husband were merchants and wealthy ones. While living with them, Aghdashloo passed much time painting alone. After seeing his talent in painting, his aunt enlisted him at painting classes of Monseigneur Basil and it was there he first learned about the oil painting technique. At the age of 19, after successfully passing the university entrance examination, he enrolled at Tehran University's school of Fine Arts; then he dropped college at 1967. In 1975, Aghdashloo held his first individual exhibition at Iran-America Society in Tehran. The exhibited paintings were mostly about floating things, dolls and some works about the Renaissance. Between 1976 and 1979, Aghdashloo helped open and launch Museums Abghineh va Sofalineh and Contemporary Arts in Tehran and also Kerman and Khorram-Abad Museums.
Aghdashloo was the holder and coordinator of several exhibitions after the Iranian revolution. While none of them were special exhibitions of his works, they played an important role in introducing contemporary Iranian art to the people inside and outside Iran. He took multiple exhibitions from Iran to other countries, including "Iranian Art, since the Past until Today" in China, "Past Iranian Art" in Japan, and the contemporary Iranian paintings with a traditional background sent to Bologna, Italy.
Style
Aghdashloo's interest in including surreal spaces in his works and painting floating objects began in his 30 years of age. During the period, his works were of floating objects having a shadow on the ground. In a surrealistic environment, he painted dolls having no faces influenced by Gergeo Deki Riko and they later became a large part of his series "Years of Fire and Snow". According to him, painting of such faceless dolls helped him say the subconscious suspicious and illusive word in the form of a painting. After the 1979 revolution and the eight-year war, most of Aghdashloo's works were about memorials and objects proceeding to doom and damage; abandoned huts and views, green wooden rotten windows with broken glasses, old doors with rusted locks, and deadly blades as symbols of missiles hitting the cities; all of them showed the painter's thinking of gradual doom and damage as the passing of hard times. Using Iranian miniature continued in his works and he used every Iranian classic style and space for transferring his subjective concepts about the contemporary world. Aghdashloo paints most of his works by gouache on canvas.
Works
Painting
Until 2014, Aghdashloo had held only one individual exhibition in Iran. The 2014 exhibition began at Asar Gallery in Tehran in November. He has also drawn some paintings for books by Bahram Beyzai, like Ayyarnameh, Modern Preface of Shahnameh, and Sheikh Sherzin's Scroll.
Graphics
Since youth, Aghdashloo designed graphic posters for exhibitions, books and films.
Writing
Aghdashloo has composed several writings in artistic and literary evaluation. Most of these criticisms are about contemporary visual arts and the past of Iran and the world.
Teaching
Aghdashloo arranged several art classes. After the revolution, he taught painting for a short while in Al-Zahra University of Tehran.
Praise by others
writes in a part of his article: "Why shouldn't I be rude and say that if there's a value in copy-painting, the patterns of the previous celebrities of painting and visualizing aren't in our reach; so that as evaluation criteria, they can testify for the level of accomplishment of those masters in copy-painting; but their works, which Aydin has remade, are a proof of Aydin's skill in copy-painting. It's obvious that copy-painting wasn't all of their art, as it's not all of Aydin's. It's Aydin's imagination and time-sighting and death-aware thought that's the final maker of his work. The crevices that time has made in the paintings, and the oppressions that the cosmos – or man's hand – has inflicted upon them. In Aydin's repaintings, these masters' praise are accompanied with sorrow for their own and their works' mortality."
