Koorosh Shishegaran was born in Qazvin in 1944, but then moved to Tehran with his family.
After graduation from the Tehran Fine Art High School, he entered the Faculty of Decorative
Arts where he did his BA in interior decoration in 1973. His more familiar style of painting is
only one of the various artistic experiences of the Shishegaran’s artistic practices. These
include a wide array of experiments on different media and a range of approaches. The works
before 1981 could be classified into different series, including Mass Production Works
(1973-74), Appropriation of Works of Great Artists (1974-76), Postal Art (1976), Art+Art
(1976-77), and other two periods – with collaboration of his brothers, Behzad and Esmail –
Art for Production (1977-78), and Political Social Posters (1978-81). Since 1983 he has
concentrated more on painting and drawing with his familiar feature: line. This interest in
whirling lines, however, was obvious in his first solo exhibition in 1973. Shishegaran
exhibited these paintings first in 1989 and then 1992, 1997, and 2006 in solo shows.
Throughout these years, aside from developing his painting style and participating in many
group exhibitions, both inside and outside Iran, he has created other series of works, such as
War Drawings (1990), Photographic Works (2006), and Self Portraits (2008). His recent solo
exhibitions were in London, Opera Gallery (2012), Bermondsey Project Space (2020) and a
review on some of his paintings in Tehran (2015). Some of his group exhibitions outside Iran
are: WashArt in Washington D.C. 1977; Basel, Switzerland, 1978; The Millennium Painting
Exhibition in London 1999; exhibition of Iranian artists in Rome, 2000; Meridian Center
exhibitions in United States, 2001-2003; Barbican Center, 2001; Beijing Biennial, 2003;
Opera Gallery, London, 2013; … With the opening up of international auction houses to
Iranian art in recent years, numerous works of the artist have been sold in these auctions.
