Mehrdad Khataei

Printmaking, drawing · b. 1976, Tabriz, Iran

Mehrdad Khataei was born in Tabriz and studied in Tehran, where he now teaches and has helped train a generation of Iranian artists. He works mainly in drawing and printmaking and takes part in specialised printmaking biennials. His work is contemporary and engaged with globalisation, yet he sees himself as rooted in Iranian experience, in what he has called “the Iranian legend”. For him, technique is a means to an idea rather than a matter of tradition: he uses it for surreal displacement, montage and allusion.

A powerful draftsman, he moves from solid, three-dimensional forms to loose arabesques, and from pathos to caricature. Several threads run through his work: layered, palimpsest-like images; the dematerialised, overexposed light of his photographs; the “glassy rooms” of his prints, where people live in spaces open to observation; and off-centre compositions that echo Iranian miniature painting. His recent large mixed-media works, combining drawing, painting and several print techniques, turn to catastrophe and, above all, to the human capacity to endure it: large red faces marked with white, surrounded by animals, household objects and figures in uniforms and gas masks.