Born in 1973 in Mashhad, Iran, Ahmad Morshedloo lives and works in Tehran and is celebrated as one of Iran’s most unique social painters. Inspired by and focused on the fast changing social issues around him, the social upheavals directly affect his works. Throughout his career as a social painter, Morshedloo has always emphasized modern man’s social and intellectual alienation as a result of his contemporary living conditions. Morshedloo believes that his art should carry a message and that being contemporary to him is about alertness and observation. For a whole decade, he documented the Iranian society in which he has deep roots. He first started mirroring his social surroundings by creating paintings of tight crowds of people, each looking at a different direction, titled the Crowd series that found International recognition. Using various techniques, he also created large oil canvases at the same time, portraying the people with whom he was in close tie, mostly in their private spaces, and carried on with examining the changes his society went through. Subsequently he created his large disproportionate sleeping figures in both oil and pen known as Sleep series, and perfectly rendered social numbness. Soon after the controversial 2009 elections, he started on making huge polyptcyhs in pen, showing enthused people, as opposed to the benumbed ones, who were all looking down of embarrassment. In his latest series of portraits, Morshedloo explored the sense of doubt and uncertainty that had surrounded the general mood of the Iranian society at this point in history.
Morshedloo has a large body of work and uses various techniques. He uses oil on canvas and pen and acrylic to project large figurative works. He also uses ink pen drawing on cardboards mounted on canvas, which have turned into some of his most recognized works in the recent years. Morshedloo received an MA in painting from Tehran’s University of Art in 2001. His work has been exposed in several international art fairs. He has participated in many group exhibitions worldwide and has held many solo shows inside Iran. In addition to being part of numerous private collections, his works are included in the collections of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Imam Ali Museum and the Saatchi Collection.
