Koorosh Shishegaran

Koorosh Shishegaran, also transliterated Kourosh Shishegaran, was born in Qazvin, Iran. Sources disagree on the exact year, most Western gallery and publisher biographies give 1944, while several Iranian auction and gallery listings give 1945, and no source in the available record gives an exact day or month. He moved to Tehran with his family as a child. He earned a painting diploma from the Tehran Fine Art High School in 1967, then a BA in interior design from the Faculty of Decorative Arts at Tehran University in 1973.

He held his first professional exhibition at Mess Gallery in Tehran in 1972, and his first exhibition outside Iran followed in Basel, Switzerland, in 1975. In 1976, according to the artist's Iranian gallery biography, he received a United Nations certificate of appreciation for his poster Peace for Lebanon; this could not be independently corroborated in the sources reviewed. Over the following decades he showed at institutions including the Barbican Centre in London (2001) and the Beijing Biennial (2003), held a solo exhibition at Opera Gallery in London (2012), and was included in the touring survey Unedited History: Iran 1960 to 2014 at the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and MAXXI in Rome (2014 to 2015). A further solo exhibition, Two-Way Street, was held at Bermondsey Project Space in London in 2020. He is understood to continue living and working in Iran, where galleries including Shirin Gallery, Soo Contemporary, and Liam Gallery continue to present and sell his work.

Shishegaran's inclusion in Unedited History: Iran 1960 to 2014, a major survey shown at the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and MAXXI in Rome, places him within the core historical narrative of Iranian modern and contemporary art, alongside his earlier appearances at the Barbican Centre and the Beijing Biennial. The critic Javad Mojabi has written appreciatively about the artist's paintings, according to the artist's own gallery biography, though a verbatim, independently sourced quotation could not be confirmed in the available sources. The recurring theme in accounts of his work is a bridging of graphic design and fine-art abstraction, with his early poster work and his later paintings treated as parts of one continuous, line-driven practice.

Shishegaran's market runs primarily through Tehran Auction rather than international salerooms. Tehran Times reported that an untitled painting sold for about 748 billion Iranian rials, converted in that report to roughly USD 935,000, at the 23rd Tehran Auction in July 2024, the best-documented high point found for his auction history. The market-data platform ArtChart separately lists an untitled work at 170,000,000,000 IRR, roughly USD 340,000, using a different rial conversion, so a single confirmed dollar record cannot be stated with certainty. A separate untitled painting (129 x 90 cm, 2020) realized USD 91,667 at the same July 2024 Tehran Auction. More recently, Still Life sold for about USD 138,000 (Tehran Times) or USD 110,000 (ArtChart) at the 24th Tehran Auction in 2025, and another untitled work realized USD 93,500 at Tehran Auction on 22 May 2025. His work has also appeared in a Christie's Dubai sale of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art, though a confirmed sale price was not found in the sources reviewed.

Public documentation of Shishegaran's market is thinner and less consistent than for artists who trade primarily through Christie's or Sotheby's; sale prices, dates, and even his birth year appear differently across otherwise credible sources, and the same auction lot can carry meaningfully different reported dollar values depending on which rial conversion a source uses. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity checks should run through the presenting gallery or auction house rather than a central archive. He is not tied to a single exclusive representative; multiple Tehran galleries, including Shirin Gallery, Soo Contemporary, and Liam Gallery, currently present his work, which makes it worth confirming the specific source and history of any individual piece before purchase.