Mehdi Ghadyanloo

Mehdi Ghadyanloo was born in 1981 in Karaj, Iran. He began his art education by learning traditional miniature painting before enrolling at the University of Tehran, where he studied in the Faculty of Fine Arts and completed a BA in painting in the mid-2000s (sources give either 2004 or 2005). He then pursued graduate study at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, completing a master's degree, described variously as being in animation or in film studies, around 2007.

Starting in the early 2000s, Ghadyanloo was commissioned by Tehran's municipal Beautification Bureau to paint large trompe l'oeil murals across the city, a program that ran roughly from 2004 to 2011 and resulted in well over one hundred works. The murals, rendered in a dreamlike, minimalist style, transformed blank building facades into illusionistic windows onto surreal or utopian scenes and became closely associated with his name both in Iran and internationally.

His practice later moved onto canvas and into international commissions. In 2016 he completed Spaces of Hope, a mural for the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, a commission described by Gagosian as making him the first artist officially commissioned in both Iran and the United States since 1979. In 2019 he produced Finding Hope, a large triptych reported to have been commissioned for the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos and to have entered the World Economic Forum Collection. He has since built solo exhibition histories with Almine Rech, Gagosian, and Dastan Gallery, and in 2024 held his first solo museum exhibition, The Stolen Memories, at the Long Museum in Shanghai. In 2026, Perrotin announced representation of Ghadyanloo in Asia ahead of Art Basel Hong Kong. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.

Critical attention to Ghadyanloo has focused on the social role of his early public murals in Tehran, which were commissioned to soften and beautify dense urban space, and on the way that project has been read as both civic beautification and a subtle form of psychological relief for city residents; Dissent Magazine's profile of the Beautification Bureau situates his murals within that broader municipal program. His move into gallery and museum contexts, including solo presentations at Gagosian and Almine Rech and his first solo museum exhibition at the Long Museum in Shanghai in 2024, has been treated by those institutions as validation of a practice that began as public art rather than studio painting. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for direct quotation in this dossier.

Ghadyanloo's auction history is thin but has grown quickly in recent years. His current auction high is Memories of the Future (2021), which sold for HKD 2,520,000 (about USD 324,000) at Christie's Hong Kong on 26 September 2024, a result Christie's-linked reporting described as a new auction record, surpassing his previous high of USD 207,000 for Exploration of the Sun (2020), set at Christie's in Shanghai on 23 September 2023. Earlier results, such as a 2019 sale of Finding Hope (Diptych) at Sotheby's London for about USD 42,927 to 43,000, show a market that was still modest before his recent run of gallery and museum exposure.

Ghadyanloo has no published catalogue raisonne, and the number of auction transactions on public record remains small, so any single result, including his current record for Memories of the Future, should be read as an early data point rather than a settled market. His recent signing with Perrotin for Asia, alongside existing representation by Gagosian, Almine Rech, and Dastan Gallery, indicates broadening international gallery support, and his inclusion in institutional collections such as the Long Museum, the Mint Museum, and the World Economic Forum Collection provides some independent validation beyond the market itself.