Born in 1947 in Lahijan, Iran, Ghassem Hajizadeh is a leading artist of his generation living and working in Paris. His admiration for old photographs and Iranian popular culture in addition to the diverse painting techniques he employs result in some unique and hearty pictorial expressions. 

Ever since his graduation from the Tehran School of Fine Arts in 1967, Hajizadeh’s work has touched on the Persian Miniature and Coffee House paintings. This, however, has not made him technically or conceptually subdued by such traditional genres. What stands out in Hajizadeh’s 40 years of artistry in Iran and abroad is his individual pictorial tone in depicting a blend of his dreams and hopes overlaid on his native historic memory without being captive of emigrants’ nostalgia.

In his paintings, Hajizadeh abstracts old photos by reproducing some sections and combining some related and unrelated images into a new unity. By using a mixture of techniques of watercolor, acrylic, gouache, pencil, pastel and varnish he creates incredibly contemporary imagery with a sense of nostalgia. By adding his own futuristic perspective to the old snapshots, he twists and twirls the documental value of each photograph and creates an artistic interpretation of the popular culture.

Hajizadeh has extensively exhibited worldwide over the last 40 years and his work can be found in myriad of private and public collections such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Seoul, the National Museum of Bangladesh and the International Museum of Naïve Art in France only to name a few.