Aydin Aghdashloo

Aydin Aghdashloo, son of Mohammad-Beik Aghdashloo (Haji Ouf) and Nahid Nakhjevan,[3] was born on October 30, 1940 in the Afakhray neighborhood of Rasht, Iran.[4] 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.[5] 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.[4]

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.[6]

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.

• List of Iranian painters

Lucie-Smith, Edward (September 1999). Art Today. Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-3888-8.

• Aydin Aghdashloo's Official Website
• Ali Dehbāshi, Aghdashloo, a passer-by by the side of the wall (Aghdashloo, āberi dar kenār-e divār), in Persian, Jadid Online, January 30, 2009, .
  • Aghdashloo: Living to Paint, in English, Jadid Online, May 14, 2009, .
  • Audio slideshow by Shokā Sahrā'i, in Persian (with English subtitles), Jadid Online, 2009: (7 min 6 sec).