ART CITIES: N.York-Mehdi Ghadyanloo

After growing up near the agricultural fields in the suburbs of Tehran, Mehdi Ghadyanloo began his career making public art, is considered one of the leading artists of the Middle East. Known in particular for his monumental trompe-l’œil murals in downtown Tehran, Ghadyanloo also creates works on canvas with surrealist and minimalist themes, evoking René Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Mehdi Ghadyanloo presents his first solo exhibition with Gagosian in New York. Known primarily for his gigantic trompe l’oeil-style murals in central Tehran, Mehdi Ghadyanloo also creates paintings, with surreal and minimalistic themes. Through his works, Ghadyanloo opens a window into the mood of life in Iran today. At the same time, he provides an autobiographical perspective, portraying the landscapes of his youth, his memories of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), and his life experience in the Islamic Republic. Although at times sombre and even suggestive of a failed utopia, Ghadyanloo’s work conveys hope that change can be effected, and it speaks with joy of what remains glorious in gloomy times. Ghadyanloo’s works envision a fictive architecture of playground slides, tubes, and ladders situated in shallow, walled spaces and lit from above by ocular skylights. Meticulously painted in acrylic and oil, their rounded forms are defined by dramatic chiaroscuro that represents the reflectivity, translucency, and opacity of polished steel, plastic, and other materials. The enigmatic paintings convey Ghadyanloo’s fascination with perspectival construction and illumination, and prompt metaphysical interpretations. From Iran, Ghadyanloo established a public art practice by completing more than a hundred expansive trompe l’oeil murals on buildings throughout Tehran from 2004 through 2011. In 2016, he became the first artist since 1979 to be officially commissioned in both Iran and the United States with the completion of his “Spaces of Hope” mural at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. In 2019, he painted “Finding Hope”, a mural triptych for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Building on the illusionism of his murals and their intensity of focus, Ghadyanloo’s dramatic works on canvas differ from them in their format, scale, and mode of address, bringing existential themes to the fore. Ghadyanloo’s imagined structures evoke memories of carefree childhood play, also suggesting both nostalgic reverie and utopian aspiration. His experience as a father whose career has necessitated extensive international travel with his children inspired him to consider playground equipment as a subject that transcends linguistic and cultural difference. The significance of these structures is complicated by their incompleteness and inaccessibility—some appear to have missing or unusable ladders and entrances, while the slides of others are unattached or blocked by chain-link fencing. One canvas features a cluster of ladders that support one another as they tower upward but fail to reach anything. In the exhibition’s largest work, a group of interconnected chambers is occupied by a labyrinthine construction in shades of pink that melds industrial machinery with floating balloons, a hopper filled with balls, and a tall toy horse on stilts and wheels.

Photo: Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The Unreachable Beauties, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 70 7/8 × 98 1/2 inches (180 × 250 cm), © Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York , NY, USA, Duration: 17/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com