Aydin Aghdashloo was born to immigrant parents in 1940 in Rasht, Iran. His father, Mohammad-Beik, was a civil engineer serving as a high-ranking politician in the government of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in Baku, and his mother, Nahid, was a descendent of the Qajar Dynasty. The couple had fled to Iran after the Soviet Union’s 1920 invasion of Azerbaijan, where Nahid would give birth to their only son. Mohammad-Beik soon found work as an engineer again, this time for the Iranian government during the era of the Pahlavi dynasty. Mohammad-Beik’s sudden death when Aghdashloo was only 11, left him and Nahid in a desperate situation, and they moved to Tehran to live with his maternal relatives.

Aghdashloo’s fascination with painting began at an early age by observing his father’s work on architectural drawings, and listening to his father read him the Shahnameh – the 10th–11th century mythological epic of Persia – was the beginnings of his love for literature. Aghdashloo became an avid reader, captivated by history and art, Old Masters, and Persian calligraphy and miniatures. He taught himself painting by studiously replicating many of these works, years before he started his painting training at the age of twelve. He practiced the techniques and fundamentals of classical Persian painting through meticulously mending and restoring old, damaged calligraphies that he bought inexpensively, and trained himself to become a gilder and a miniaturist. These early obsessions would be the catalyst for Aghdashloo’s life-long passion for art restoration and collection. Aghdashloo’s painting skills grew rapidly, and at the age of 14 he made his first sale with a commissioned work. Around the same time, taking advice from Iranian cultural theorist and philosopher, Dariush Shayegan after a chance encounter, Aghdashloo began exploring vigorously to develop his own artistic concept and style.

Aghdashloo attended Jam High School in Tehran, and quickly established life-long friendships with a few of his peers, who’d become some of the most influential artists and writers of their generation. The group included filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, painter Ali Golestaneh, and later on, novelist Shamim Bahar. Over the next decades, these artists and intellectuals would go on to impress on the wider Iranian art and culture, while their friendship remained strong.

At the age of 16, Aghdashloo was diagnosed with polio and was bedridden for a year, which allowed him to read ferociously, sink deeper into studying art, and learn English. After recovering in 1957, Aghdashloo returned to school, and started working at an advertising agency as a graphic designer and illustrator, which provided a steady income for him and his mother for many years. His professional creative work further improved his painting technique, especially under the guidance of his art director and colleague Biuk Ahmari at Ashena Agency. In 1959, Aghdashloo enrolled in the Painting program at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, but he felt uninspired with the curriculum and eventually left school. As he continued on his personal path of discovery, he drew from a myriad of styles and genres including Surrealist paintings, Renaissance sketches, Giorgio de Chirico-inspired mannequins, abstract and minimalist geometric shapes, and Impressionist portraits and landscapes.

1964 marked the beginning of Aghdashloo’s literary career, as he published articles and reviews on arts and culture for the influential intellectual magazine Andisheh va Honar. During the next decade, Aghdashloo worked at a number of different advertising agencies, wrote regularly for various publications, and painted in his free time. He married his first wife, Shohreh Vaziri-Tabar, in 1972, who became a successful actress in Iran and abroad later on. Aghdashloo’s writings were noticed by the National Iranian Radio and Television, and in 1974 he began to write, produce, and present a popular TV show about art titled Ways of Seeing, which ran for two years.

In 1975, Aghdashloo was invited by the Iran-America Society, an American cultural centre in Tehran, to hold his debut solo exhibition at their gallery. It featured 20 paintings of different themes and styles, from minimalist floating objects to the iconic piece Identity: In Praise of Sandro Botticelli. His medium of choice was gouache, which remains his favourite to this day, although he occasionally works in coloured pencils, ink, or watercolour as well. Firouz Shirvanloo, an influential cultural policy-maker who was the artistic adviser for the Office of Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, Empress of Iran, at the time, acquired three paintings for Shahbanu’s office. A few months after his successful exhibit, in spring of 1976, he was offered the prestigious position of Cultural and Artistic Director at the Office of Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi – which he accepted. During his two-year-long official tenure, Aghdashloo conceived and realized numerous prominent projects, and contributed to Iranian arts and culture as a museologist, cultural diplomat, and policymaker. His achievements during that period include the establishment of three museums, and curation and organization of two major exhibitions of Iranian art in China and Japan. In 1977, Aghdashloo was appointed Director of Reza Abbasi Museum in Tehran – which he had also founded, running the Islamic art museum until he was relieved of all his official duties in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In tandem with his public service career, Aghdashloo launched his most prolific and distinguished series, Memories of Destruction. In this series, works of 15th and 16th century European painters, or centuries-old Persian artists or craftsmen whom Aghdashloo revered as pinnacles of mastery of their craft and time, were appropriated and used as inspiration by the artist. Witnessing the cultural and political upheaval that was causing immense negligence around him, destroying what he defined as beautiful, intelligent, and skillful, he started applying that same annihilation to reproductions of these works. He would paint a work of art that was damaged in some way, or create an artwork with utmost care and diligent attention to details, and physically disfigure it afterwards. This experiment became Aghdashloo's artistic signature, and defining of not just his art, but his life’s philosophy. Obsessed with what he saw as an assault on enlightenment, arts, and culture, Aghdashloo’s outlook grew more subversive, yet refined and potent. His search for the sublime continued; in Renaissance paintings, in 800-year-old broken Iranian pottery, in the magnificent portraits of bejeweled kings and nobles of the Qajar Dynasty, and in pages of antique illustrated books. Aghdashloo saw their timeless beauty, and then did as time does to all – destroy them.

The revolution had significant personal as well as professional consequences for Aghdashloo. While Shohreh decided to emigrate to the United States, Aghdashloo could not leave what he calls his “cultural fountain”[1] behind; they divorced shortly after. In late 1979, Aghdashloo took a teaching position at Al-Zahra University in Tehran, but it was cut short due to the Islamization policies that shut down all universities for three years as part of the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Before the dust of the revolution had settled, the Iran-Iraq War began, and brought even more uncertainty. Despite the socio-political mayhem, Aghdashloo married his second wife Firoozeh Athari in 1981, who was a young architect with a passion for art. Their son Takin was born in 1982 – shortly before Nahid’s death – and his daughter Tara was born in the last year of the war, in 1988. In this dark period for the country’s arts and culture, Aghdashloo established his private art academy in Tehran the same year he got married, providing Iranian visual arts a vital lifeline by teaching painting and art history, and mentoring a new generation of artists; a feat he dedicated himself to for nearly four decades.

Unable to exhibit his art due to the new political landscape and its cultural sensitivities, Aghdashloo relied on illustration as a means of expression, in addition to his art practice. Each commissioned book cover or film poster was treated as an artwork, and “every bookshop [in Iran] became a gallery.”[2] During the 1980s, in other series such as Notes on Malek Garden, Self-portraits, or Insignificant Landscapes, Aghdashloo documented the frailty of the recurring actors in life – an abandoned pool, an old wooden door, or a murky sea. These scenes are solemn, vulnerable yet defiant, magnificent even with the passage of time. They are gestures to old age, death, and loneliness. Later on in the 1990s and onwards, Aghdashloo’s poignant critiques of tyranny and censorship continued with his Falling Angels and Enigma series.

Considering the social and political instability in Iran, Aghdashloo’s family, Firoozeh, Takin, and Tara, migrated to Toronto, Canada in 2001. Despite the hardships of being away from his family, and the disruptive challenges of immigration, Aghdashloo’s main base remained in Tehran while frequently visiting Toronto. As he put it: “the vastness of one’s world, emanates from the vastness of one’s creativity, and usually not the other way around.”[3] After settling in Toronto, Firoozeh opened Arta Gallery, where Aghdashloo held his second solo exhibition in 2006. She remained his ally and confidant throughout his life and career, even after their separation in 2007, and he maintains a close relationship with his children, both of whom are involved in the arts. Nearly four decades after his debut solo exhibition in Tehran, Aghdashloo held his second show in his home country at Assar Art Gallery in 2014; the exhibit was dedicated to his children, and opened to enormous public anticipation and enthusiasm making it one of the all-time most popular private visual arts events in Iran. During the run of the show, large crowds of visitors lined up regularly outside the gallery to gain entry. 

Aghdashloo published his first collection of essays and interviews, Of Joys and Yearnings, in 1992. Subsequently, his wide-ranging interests and expertise led him to publish more than a dozen books – largely on contemporary culture and Iranian art history – and deliver many lectures in Iran and internationally. Aghdashloo was invited to participate at the 2004 Milan exhibition Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran 1501–1576 as the only Iranian scholar to represent the country. Despite his prolific body of work and popularity, Aghdashloo has refused solo exhibitions for the most part, only agreeing to four exhibitions during his career. In 2016, he was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France. In 2021 his work was shown alongside masterpieces by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling in Bruges, Belgium, linking the paintings of the two artists. He lives and works between his studio in downtown Tehran, and Toronto.

1 Aydin Aghdashloo in conversation with Fakhreddin Anvar, Tehran, Spring 2016
2 Aydin Aghdashloo in conversation with Shahrouz Nazari, Twice After Death. Tehran, Summer 2022
3 Aydin Aghdashloo, Of Joys and Yearnings, Tehran, 1992