Reza Derakhshani

Reza Derakhshani was born in 1952 in Sangsar, in northeastern Iran. He earned a diploma in mathematics before turning to formal art training, and in 1976 he graduated with a BA in Visual Art from the Faculty of Fine Art at the University of Tehran. He went on to study visual arts at the Pasadena School of Art in California in 1978.

Derakhshani works as a painter, and is also known as a musician and performance artist, a combination reflected in the layered, gestural surfaces of his paintings, which mix oil, tar, glitter, and gold leaf. His recurring subjects draw on Persian mythology and history, most often via hunting scenes and the mythic bird Simorgh, alongside garden and landscape imagery that recalls Persian miniature painting reworked at a monumental scale. Sources describe him dividing his time in recent years among several bases, including the United States and locations in Europe and Russia, and he continues to exhibit and work actively.

Public gallery and museum sources emphasize exhibitions and collection holdings rather than named prizes, and no formally documented award could be confirmed for this profile. In 2016 he had two major solo museum exhibitions in the same year, "The Breeze at Dawn" at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and a solo show at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (Museum Gunzenhauser) in Germany, his first painting exhibition in that country.

Derakhshani is widely described in gallery and museum literature as one of the leading Iranian painters of his generation, credited with translating Persian mythological and pastoral subject matter into a large-scale, materially dense contemporary idiom. His museum presence, including exhibitions at the State Russian Museum and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in the same year, 2016, and holdings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, has reinforced that reputation on an institutional level. No verbatim, attributable review from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so his critical standing here rests on institutional recognition and museum programming rather than quoted criticism.

Derakhshani's auction market is anchored in Iran. His recorded high is "The Simorgh Hunting," which sold for 80,000,000,000 Iranian rials, reported at the time as roughly USD 250,000, at the 16th Tehran Auction on 1 July 2022. Tehran Times described it as the most expensive artwork sold at that sale. His next-highest recorded results are "Counting Days and Nights, Every Day and Every Night," sold at Tehran Auction in 2021 for a price reported variously between USD 168,000 and USD 226,000 depending on the source, and an untitled 2010 canvas that sold for USD 221,000 at Christie's Dubai on 16 March 2016, his highest confirmed result at a major Western house. The gap between his Iran-based results and his results at Western houses is wide, and currency conversions for the rial-denominated Tehran Auction figures depend on the exchange rate used at the time of sale.

Most of Derakhshani's highest recorded prices have been set at Tehran Auction, in Iranian rials, which means dollar-equivalent figures are estimates tied to the exchange rate at the time of sale rather than a fixed benchmark. His highest confirmed result at a major Western house, Christie's Dubai, is well below his Tehran Auction record, so a single headline price does not describe his full market. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and documentation should be checked against his exhibition history and the galleries, principally Leila Heller Gallery, that have represented him.