Reza Derakshani

Reza Derakshani was born in 1952 in Sangsar, a village in northeastern Iran. He completed a high school diploma in mathematics before turning to art, earning a B.A. in Visual Art from the University of Tehran in 1976 and then continuing his studies at the Pasadena School of Art in California in 1978. He taught at the University of Tehran before leaving the country after the Islamic Revolution, a period during which he lived and worked in New York and Italy and engaged with Abstract Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist circles.

His practice combines painting with poetry, music, and performance, and his imagery draws recurrently on mythic and hunting subjects, including the Simorgh, the mythical bird of Persian literature. In 2016 he had two major solo museum exhibitions, at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (Museum Gunzenhauser) in Germany, alongside a retrospective in Tehran; an earlier retrospective was held at the House of Artists, Tehran, in 2002. Gallery and press sources describe him, at various points, as living and working between Austin, Texas, Dubai, and St. Petersburg, with one source also citing Istanbul. These accounts do not fully agree, and no single current base can be confirmed with certainty. He continues to exhibit and produce new work as of 2026.

Gallery and market sources consistently describe Derakshani as among the most significant living Iranian artists, citing his synthesis of Persian literary and visual tradition with international modernist and expressionist idioms. His work has been noted in coverage by outlets including The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, according to gallery biographies, and a Sotheby's program has introduced him as one of Iran's most celebrated living artists. No verbatim, attributed critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from the available research, so none is quoted here.

Derakshani's market runs on two tracks. Domestically, his auction high is The Simorgh Hunting (also referred to as The Simorq Hunting), a mixed-media canvas that sold for 80 billion Iranian rials, reported at roughly USD 250,000 to 295,000 depending on the exchange rate used, at the 16th Tehran Auction in Tehran on 1 July 2022. It stood as the top lot of that sale. Another major domestic result, One Golden Winter Hunt, led the 24th Tehran Auction at about USD 154,000; the exact sale date could not be independently confirmed.

Internationally, his prices run considerably lower. Those Roots Drink Quietly (2006) sold for GBP 23,700 (about USD 31,800) at Bonhams London on 4 June 2026, which reportedly exceeded an earlier 2025 Sotheby's result of about USD 22,500 for the artist. The gap between his Tehran Auction record and his international results is wide, and a collector should treat the two markets as distinct rather than reading one as a benchmark for the other.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Derakshani, and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program; works should be verified through his current galleries, Leila Heller Gallery, which has mounted several recent solo shows in New York and Dubai, and Dastan Gallery, in Tehran. His exact birth date is not documented beyond the year 1952, and biographical sources disagree on his current primary residence, so both should be treated as open questions rather than settled facts. Most importantly, his auction record is anchored in the Tehran market rather than the international one; the headline USD-equivalent figure for his top lot depends heavily on which exchange rate is applied to the rial sale price, and his broader international auction results sit well below that domestic high.