Even after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the western pop art collected by Farah, the last shah’s wife, remained on show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Works such as those by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein inspired a generation of artists, among them Khosrow Hassanzadeh, who has died aged 59 of alcohol poisioning after consuming bootleg arak.
Where those artworks depicted people such as Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger, Hassanzadeh instead paid homage to greats held dear by working-class Iranians.
His Pahlavan series from the early 2000s is a typical mix of kitsch and pathos: silkscreen prints based on historical photographs of pahlavans, or wrestlers, that Hassanzadeh found in the photography shops of south Tehran. Their hammy poses but nonetheless impressive physiques are rendered in bright, contrasting colours – subtly political, the artworks are a meditation on modern masculinity and national resilience.
Referring to the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, the artist said: “The war itself was based on a particular sense of manhood.”
He would later use images of wrestlers in a variety of media, including a bricolage portrait, exhibited at the British Museum in 2009, of Gholamreza Takhti, one of the greatest in the sport, surrounded by symbols of Shia Islam, peacock feathers and fairy lights, and presented in a box-frame shrine.
While Iran’s turbulent history, which played an integral part to Hassanzadeh’s own life, was a feature of his practice, much of his work poked fun at western preconceptions. A series of drawings, Chador (2001), croquis in style, imagines women in veils of intricately patterned and coloured designs, playing with orientalist ideas of femininity and subjugation.
His Terrorist series is more pointed. Made for a 2005 exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, over several huge silkscreens the artist portrayed himself and female relatives as terrorists, photographed against a backdrop of Qur’anic calligraphy, shrines and religious banners.
“It is a reflection of a world where the word ‘terrorist’ is thrown about thoughtlessly … the west, with its personal definition of terrorism, gives itself the right to take over a country,” he said. “In exploring these questions, I portrayed the people in whom I have the most faith: my mother and sisters.”
Born in Tehran, Khosrow was the son of Najibeh Barazadeh and Zolfaghar Hassanzadeh, Iranian Azerbaijanis originally from the countryside who opened a fruit shop in the city. The revolution happened when Khosrow was 16, and he dropped out of school to join the basij, a local militia that ensured the “morality” of neighbours. He was later conscripted to fight in the war, but his commanders realised they could make propaganda use of his artistic abilities, and Hassanzadeh was tasked with painting portraits of the Iranian soldiers who had died, posters of which were then distributed across the country.
He would say that this saved him from joining the slain he was depicting. “Based on my background, I should have been a bazaar merchant or a drug dealer.”
Instead, returning to selling fruit after the war ended in 1988, he started painting on the cardboard boxes the fresh produce came in. His earliest works were drawings of friends and family done on brown paper bags, a process he later characterised as “glamorising the worthless”.
In 1989, Hassanzadeh enrolled at the faculty of painting of the Mojtama-e-Honar University, Tehran. “The revolution made an opportunity for me. Before, it was only the rich who could go abroad to study art. It opened things up, in that way,” he told the Guardian in 2021.
While Iran’s artists were normally plucked from the western-facing elite, the young man relished his outsider status. “The other students were shocked that a guy who looked like me had walked in,” he said. “They thought I came to raid the place.”
He had two local exhibitions, at Barg gallery in 1991 and Djamshidieh gallery in 1994, but took a break to study Persian literature at Azad University in the capital, while, in 1996, secretly attending a clandestine art school organised by the artist Aydin Aghdashloo for two years.
The latter’s surrealism can be read as an influence on Hassanzadeh’s War series, nightmarish black-and-white drawings featuring figures in gas masks and body bags. These won him international attention when they were shown in 1999 at the Diorama Arts Centre in London.
Now that he had the attention of non-Iranians, whose pictures “are often to do with how east and west see one another”, he said, Hassanzadeh pivoted to address issues of religion and tradition, producing Ashura (2000), paintings that feature the female saints of Shia Islam, and Prostitutes (2002), a haunting tribute to 16 women killed by a religious extremist, shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, as part of the exhibition Far Near Distance. In 2006 he presented his first retrospective at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and three years later he was nominated for the Victoria & Albert museum’s Jameel prize.
His work was included in Epic Iran at the V&A (2021) and last year he had a solo show at Vida Heydari Contemporary in Pune, where he explored India and Iran’s shared history of poetry through a series of pastel and ink works.
Hassanzadeh was married twice, first to Ashraf Mehmandoost, with whom he had two children, Nadia and Yashar, and then to Eugenie Dolberg, with whom he also had two children, Xenia and Inez. Both marriages ended in divorce.
He is survived by his partner, Shahrzad Afrashteh, his children, and by a sister, Azima, and brother, Arshad.
• Khosrow Hassanzadeh, artist, born 21 December 1963; died 2 July 2023
