Aydin Aghdashloo is a prominent and renowned Iranian artist who has been working for more than 50 years, selling his first painting at the age of 14. He is predominantly a painter, but also an author, art historian, art critic, teacher, and graphic designer. Many young contemporary painters in Iran have been taught by Aghdashloo and he frequently lectures in different universities around Iran, where he currently lives. He is an expert in Iranian pre-Islamic and Islamic art history and artifacts, with several scholarly publications and reviews on this theme.
As a self-taught artist in his teens, Aghdashloo became fascinated with the art of the Renaissance very early on in his career. He began duplicating Velazquez and Botticelli to perfect his skills, and went on to paint his Memories of Destruction series in the 1970s. The painting here can be linked to this style, which recounts the narrative of the destruction or the metamorphosis of tradition and old values which were "deprived of fruition in our time, and could not sustain themselves." Aghdashloo has revisited these series in his recent works, with even more brutality and a ruthless vision. The annihilation of beauty and the triviality of this sense of loss is a reccurring theme in his works.