Tehran's answer to Banksy: Mehdi Ghadyanloo hits Britain

Flying cars, magic portals, levitating giraffes … street artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo’s eye-popping murals make Tehran smile – but his paintings also probe Iran’s turbulent past

Mehdi Ghadyanloo in front of his mural in Shoreditch, London. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

On a wall in east London, two giant crows loom over two young women who are swinging a rope. As a child jumps over the skipping rope, he approaches a hole in the ceiling above him. But if he finally jumps high enough to rise above the confines of the concrete ceiling, he will become prey for the waiting birds.

This is a mural by Mehdi Ghadyanloo, an Iranian artist who is about to have his first exhibition in Britain. It is an unexpected addition to the walls of Shoreditch; the neighbourhood famous for its street art rarely sees anything as subtle as this. As if to make the point, a car park nearby is plastered with ugly, third-rate graffiti. Ghadyanloo, by contrast, makes use of trompe l’oeil, the technique invented in the Renaissance of using perspective to create eye-fooling illusions. It is eerily arresting and poetic.

Ghadyanloo has more in common with the metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico than he does with Banksy. Yet in terms of success as a street artist, he is undoubtedly the Banksy of Tehran. Astonishingly, there are over 100 walls in Iran’s capital decorated by Ghadyanloo. His murals are so popular, he tells me, that there are even imitation Ghadyanloos: “Sometimes districts order my works to be painted by other people. There are many copies of my work in Tehran.”

His paintings are not illegal. On the contrary, he was commissioned by the city government to paint them. Nine years ago – in 2006, or by the Iranian calendar, 1384 – “the municipality published a call for artists”. Fresh out of an art course at Tehran University, he applied.

Tehran is a city of blank walls, he explains. “I heard Tehran still has 5,000 blank walls to be painted. They said: ‘You can find your wall and suggest your idea.’ The Beautification Organisation liked my works ...”

No wonder. Ghadyanloo’s murals in Tehran open windows in the sky. He sees them as a utopian protest against the city’s pollution and smog. “Sometimes you have only grey skies. I wanted to paint clear skies. I would like Tehran to be like my works.”

Using his mastery of trompe l’oeil, he paints huge walls with what he calls suggestive moments from unwritten short stories. His scenes are dream-like, ambiguous. Cars fly in space in a science-fiction city. Holes open to reveal blue skies. Fairies peep through the portals. People walk on roofs. “I want to give a smiling moment,” he says.

Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity

The Curious Case of a 2008 Mural in Tehran: 
Q&A with University of Michigan art history professor and muralist Christiane Gruber

Mural of Muhammad’s ascension, located at the intersection of Modarres and Motahhari Avenues, Tehran, Iran, 2008. Courtesy Jadaliyya.

In 2008, a five-story mural was painted onto the wall of an apartment building in the northern section of Tehran. The mural represents the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension into the heavens, as well as an inhabitant of Paradise offering a flower to a man in the lower right corner. While the composition is based on a 15th-century “Book of Ascension” manuscript, it nevertheless has been altered in two significant ways: first, a man painted in a hyper-realistic mode has been inserted into the composition and, second, the facial features of the Prophet have been removed. Tracing how the original painting has been pictorially augmented and edited for the public sphere, this talk offers some new ideas on how images are received and updated in modern Islamic artistic practices. It will do so by paying special attention to the mural’s symbolic position within Iran’s Shi‘i-Islamic politico-cultural agenda and oppositional responses to the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy of 2005-2006.

by Sarah Vassello, The Daily Tar Heel

Christiane Gruber, an art history professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan, will speak at Hanes Art Center today about her work on a five-story mural in Tehran, Iran, painted in 2008, that represents the Prophet Muhammad and the changing visual representation of Islamic tradition. Sarah Vassello spoke with Gruber about the ways in which changes in the Iranian political, artistic and cultural spheres are shown in the painting and how the Dutch cartoon controversy of 2005, in which the Prophet Muhammad was depicted, prompted such a strong response from Iranians.

Daily Tar Heel: What first made you interested in the lecture topic?

Christiane Gruber: I’ve been researching this topic for about a dozen years — images and texts of the Prophet in Islamic devotional traditions — so, for me, what is interesting as an art historian is the way in which Islamic religious cultures and political cultures use images to make certain claims or to send message.

DTH: This mural is relatively recent. How did you come to hear about it?

CG: I drove right across it when I was in Tehran and it caught my eye. I’ve been working on images of Muhammad in Islam across the board and also mural arts in Iran for the last 12 years. I typically do go around Iran and look at the murals — I’ve studied them, I’ve written about them — and when I found this one, which captures both my interest in images of Muhammad and mural arts, and I saw what was happening in the mural, I decided I should really set myself to the task of understanding what was happening with that mural.