Background
Ethnicity:
His father was a Caucasian-Azerbaijani, a Tat Persian.
Aydin Aghdashloo was born on October 30, 1940 in Rasht, Iran. He is the son of Mohammad-Beik Aghdashloo and Nahid Nakhjevan.
Ethnicity:
His father was a Caucasian-Azerbaijani, a Tat Persian.
Aydin Aghdashloo was born on October 30, 1940 in Rasht, Iran. He is the son of Mohammad-Beik Aghdashloo and Nahid Nakhjevan.
Initially, Aydin studied art under the guidance of Habib Mohammadi, a painter and teacher from Rasht. At the age of nineteen, he entered the College of Fine Arts at University of Tehran after taking the competitive examination, where he studied till 1967.
In 1972, Aydin started working as a partner at the advertising company "Gam". Two years later in 1974, Aghdashloo produced and performed the television show "Seeing Methods" at National Iranian Radio and Television. The show continued until 1976.
Since 1973 to 1978, he taught at beautiful arts male high school and Decorative Arts School of Tehran. Later, Aydin exhibited a series of his books and handwriting, which included 140 books and pieces from fourth to fourteenth Hijri centuries, at Negarestan Museum and sold all of his series to the museum.
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, works that later became the first pieces of the "Termination Memories" series and well showed the formation of the thought of annihilation and death in his mind.
During the period from 1976 to 1979, Aghdashloo helped open and launch Museums Abghineh va Sofalineh and Contemporary Arts in Tehran and also Kerman and Khorram-Abad Museums.
After the 1979 revolution, Aydin organized and held several exhibitions. 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.
After the revolution, he taught painting for a short while in AlZahra University in Tehran, but lost his job after the cultural revolution and started teaching at a private art house.
Until 2014, Aghdashloo had held only one individual exhibition in Iran. The 2014 exhibition began at Asar Gallery in Tehran on November and had outstanding public support until the police was forced to interfere in the queue of visitors.
In addition to several modern paintings, he has hundreds of writings, including art and film criticism, research about the history of art and travel literature.
Currently, Aydin Aghdashloo lives in Tehran and spends most of his time at his personal atelier, which is his painting workplace and artistic researches, and also the place of keeping the old dishes and objects from previous centuries, that he utilizes in his works.
Portrait of the artist at forty-eight
Cover Design, Unpublished Portrait of Naser-Al-Din SHah
End of an Era
Self Portrait of Artist
Notes on Malek Garden
Poster for Culture Festival
Falling Angels II
Survivors, In Praise of Sandro Botticelli
Galectic destruction
Flowers
1984/1384
Calvino's II Barone rampante
Cover Design, Portrait of Kamal-Al-Molk
Portrait of Firoozeh
Incignificant Landscapes
Portrait
Renaissance Tree (Panels of a Diptych)
Cover Design, Unpublished, Portrait of Virginia Woolf
Memories of destruction
Untitled
Enigma V , Enigma VI
Cover Design, For a Novel
Falling Angels III
Cover Design for Film Magazine, 1987 Fajr Film Festival Special Issue
Incignificant Landscapes
Falling Angels IV
Memories of destruction, Portrait of My Mother
Cover Design, For A Book on Iranian Constitutionalists
Falling Angels I
Book Cover: "Trial, By Frantz Kafka"
Situation VI
Identity, In praise of Sandro Botticelli
Portrait
The Triumph of Death
Notes on Malek Garden
Cover Design for G. Stein's Picasso
Portrait of Shamim Bahar
Mors – Vita, gouache on card (diptych each)
A Miniature, After Reza Abbasi
Aydin always listens to music while working.
Quotes from others about the person
"Aghdashloo's best works will, along with the most meritorious artistic and literary achievements of this divergent and amazing generation, remain for the future generations. Originality is a requirement, and that's a feature that can be found in Aghdashloo's best works." — Karim Emami, a translator
"Aydin well knows that the sound of excessive clappings deafens you and the flashlight of the photographers blinds you, even if you wear black glasses. The most important feature that I saw in Aydin during these 45 years that never faded away either during youth or now that we both have white hair and we don't color is that he has always looked at the universe with insight and wisdom and hasn't become too proud after discovering a new domain." — Ahmadreza Ahmadi, a poet
Aydin married Shohreh Vaziri-Tabar, a theater and film actress, in 1972. Eight years later, in 1980, the couple divorced. Some time later, Aghdashloo married Firouzeh Athari. They have a son and a daughter — Takin and Tara.
