Mehdi Ghadyanloo | The Armory Show 2020

Dastan is pleased to announce its participation at the Armory Show with a presentation of works by Mehdi Ghadyanloo at Booth P16. The current presentation will consist of a series of works on canvas. 

Mehdi Ghadyanloo (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) is a graduate of Painting (BA, University of Tehran, 2005) and Film Making (MA, Tarbiat Modares University, 2007), currently living and working in London, UK. He is one of Iran's most renowned public artists, best known for his more than 100 large scale trompe l'oeil-style gigantic murals. He is also the first Iranian artist to be commissioned in both Iran and the US after the revolution in 1979. In addition to his public art pieces, he makes paintings on canvas and uses print making techniques. He creates surreal images using limited visual elements, often exploring the contemporary life in Iran. Ghadyanloo's works have been exhibited at numerous international galleries, including Galleri Golsa, Oslo and Howard Griffin Gallery, London. In 2016, he completed a large mural for the Rose Kennedy Greenway project in Boston, US. His most recent public art project was a 186 square meter triptych painting titled "Finding Hope" that was shown at the World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos, Switzerland. 

While with his works, he presents an autobiographical view that portrays his personal childhood landscapes and recollections of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), he explores the contemporary life and his direct experience of the world he is living in. Ghadyanloo's most recent works show everyday objects such as a slide that he comes across to as he takes his kids to the local playground and explore the physical presence of reality. As the artist explains: "these works make reference to memories of living in small and dimly lit cubic rooms to which his family would find refuge during the war".

Ghadyanloo's trompe l'oeil style make these small cubic rooms come up as three-dimensional lifelike presentations of a carnivalesque scene, at first appearing as staged photography. While upon a second look, almost immediately, the painted reality is revealed through the presence of an uncanny element, an unlikely source of light or a recourse to the outside world of the room through an aperture. His realistic rendering techniques allows for what is normally separated to reunite; the coexistence of everyday physicality and dreamlike imagery.

The inside-out world of Ghadyanloo's paintings provide a dualistic presentation of unlikely elements confined together in a closed space, neatly framed but not completely sealed. These elements almost always include their opposites within themselves; lights are fraught with shadows, enclosures are unfettered by lines of flight, and fear is accompanied by hope. Hope in Ghadyanloo's paintings, interact with the "closed" matter-of-factness of the cubic rooms, surpassing their actuality and making room for future opportunities. As much as hope as a future-directed form of anticipation provides new forms of access to reality, Ghadyanloo's paintings are suggestive of new possibilities for active relation to a reality which is positively expectant of what is yet to come.