Mehrdad Rashidi

b. 1963 · Sari, Iran

He fled Iran at twenty and discovered, decades later in Germany, that drawing faces on old envelopes made him happy. The envelopes are now in museums.

The life

Rashidi was born in 1963 in Sari, northern Iran. In 1983, an opponent of the Islamic Republic, he went into exile with his brother, travelling through Pakistan and Afghanistan to Moscow, where he studied journalism for five years before settling near Düsseldorf. He worked sundry jobs for years, and then in 2006, for no particular reason, began to draw, finding that it relaxed him and carried him back to his homeland, his childhood and easier times. An acclaimed Düsseldorf solo show followed in 2012, and in 2013 he won the Grand Prix for Marginal Art at the Belgrade biennial of naive and marginal art.

The work

Ink drawings, often in blue, on whatever paper is nearest: old notebooks, envelopes, shopping receipts and discarded advertising pamphlets. Interlocked heads and faces emerge out of one another with a figurative logic all his own, recalling calligraphy and traditional Iranian ornament, and in recent years his own poems are written into the compositions. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Museum of Everything in London.

Why we love them

Homesickness with nowhere to go became a portable country of faces. In his hands every scrap of waste paper is an open border.

Go deeper

• Mehrdad Rashidi at the Outsider Art Fair
• Henry Boxer Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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