Khosrow Hassanzadeh

Khosrow Hassanzadeh was born in 1963 in Tehran, Iran and holds degrees in Painting and Persian Literature. He is one of the most prominent Iranian artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited in numerous national and international venues, including over thirty solo exhibitions, and is part of permanent institutional collections such as Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, The British Museum, KIT Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, World Bank (Washington, DC), and the National Museum of Scotland. Khosrow Hassanzadeh’s work is the subject of two documentaries by the renowned Iranian journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari.

Khosrow was born in a traditional working-class Iranian Azeri family who ran a fruit shop in Tehran. Working along his family members in the shop, he began drawing on packaging Cardboard from a young age, a material he continues to use for drawing and painting, calling the practice “glamorizing the worthless”, and making large paintings on the neglected packaging carboard.

During the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a young Khosrow volunteered as a soldier and directly experienced the horrors of war at an early age. Once the war was over, he decided to study art and began creating paintings themed around his experiences during the war. The pieces he created were simultaneously daring, fresh, and inspired by traditional Iranian schools such as the Saqqakhaneh Movement, Shia symbolism, Persian calligraphy, poetry, and literature.

He began gaining international recognition with “War” (1998), a grim and trenchant diary of his own experiences as a volunteer soldier during the war. In “Ashura” (2000) a 'women-friendly' interpretation of the most revered Shiite religious ceremony, he depicted chador-clad women engulfed by religious iconography. “Chador” (2001) and “Prostitutes” (2002) continued his exploration of sociological themes particular to Iran's hyper-gendered urban landscape. The latter paintings used police mug-shots to pay tribute to sixteen prostitutes killed by a serial killer in Mashhad, one of Iran’s most religious cities. The paintings were created after filmmaker Maziar Bahari commissioned Khosrow to create a poster for his film, “And Along Came a Spider” which narrated the story of the killings. In “Terrorist” (2004) the artist questions the concept of 'terrorism' in international politics by portraying himself, his mother, and his sisters as ‘terrorists’. “Bache Mahal” (2007), “Yaa Ali Madadi” (2009), and many of the artist’s works created during the time continued to be themed around traditional Iranian culture, folklore, religious rituals and ceremonies.

Since the late 2000s, Khosrow began extending his paintings and large pieces into assemblages, boxes that brought together several media and materials. Such works were initially labeled “Ready to Order” and the boxes depicted an almost shrine-like setting that resembled the temporary Iranian Shia monuments (“Hejleh”) that commemorate the recent death of a young person. These assemblages gradually evolved to include many of the artist’s themes and subject matters, becoming an iconic characteristic of his practice.

Starting in the early 2000s, “Pahlavans”, the traditional Iranian wrestlers, became the focus of his work, a subject matter that Khosrow continued to work on for almost a decade. In these works, Hassanzadeh introduced the medium of ceramic tiles into his work. Historically in Islamic art, religious manuscripts and images are painted on ceramic tiles and placed on the walls and domes of mosques and religious venues. Khosrow chose this traditional medium to give importance to his characters, stating that the impact of these people is as critical as their religious counterparts, honoring them with the importance and worth they deserve. “Pahlavans” evolved into later works and series such as “Dome” (2010), “Gandhi” (2012), “Takhti” (2014), “Warhol Saved Me” (2016), “Khonyagar” (2019), and “Reza the Motorcyclist Returns” (2021), among others.

Khosrow Hassanzadeh lived and worked in Tehran and London