Hossein Shahtaheri is known for his semi-impressionist paintings of Qajar court scenes. This contemporary painter was born in Tehran and started painting in 1996. In addition to painting, he has been active in decor design, installation, and restoration of paintings and photography.

In 2000, this artist designed the Museum of Anthropology of Hamedan Province (Lotfalian House), and in 2002 he created an installation for the Bam earthquake memorial. His second installation experience took place in Tehran's Laleh Park in 2005. He received a bachelor's degree in painting from the Soureh University of Shiraz in 2007, and in 2008, he presented an article and lecture at a conference on the Shiraz school. His designs were displayed in a group exhibition at the Imam Ali Museum in Tehran the following year. In 2010, he again participated in a group exhibition with his sculptures in the same museum. The same year, he started collaborating with Malek National Museum in the documentary and photography department. The activity and experience of working with historical works led to a more detailed investigation and more attention to the history of Iranian art. Finally, the first solo exhibition of this artist was held in Tehran Gallery 26 in 2015.

Shahtaheri shapes his collection of works with influence from the historical artworks of different periods, such as Qajar, Safavid, or Zandiyeh, and examines the culture of people in the past and present. Like many trends in contemporary Iranian art, it goes to the court photos of the Qajar era. His work style in drawing court associations is closest to the impressionist style. He gets a blurred and vague reflection of his subjects with spaced taches that sit on the canvas, mainly using a painting knife. This method for impressionist painters was connected with the experience of the French painter in understanding and meeting the daily and transitory affairs of urban life; in Shahtaheri's works, it is somehow related to the issue of memory and the mechanisms of remembering the past.

He deconstructs the mechanism of memory. In this way, he takes photos of the Qajar period, and by creating ambiguity and discontinuity between the constituent particles of these images, he pours them in the form of discrete and porous spots like dumb and vague memories, Ghosts of history. Visiting these paintings is an experience similar to summoning the scattered and elusive particles of the past and the constant effort of the mind to connect these components and reach a coherent, clear, and definite image. An attempt that is always doomed to failure. An echo of this sentence from the movie "Sunless" by Chris Marker: "We don't remember, we rewrite memory, as history is written." 

In a conversation, Shahtahari spoke of his deep interest in the "limbo between photographed images and the Qajar period paintings" and his feeling of closeness and kinship with these images' characters: "It is as if a reality remains between what was and what was depicted. With a great distance from both." It is as if by creating a distance between the continuous elements of Qajar's photos and turning them into separate spots, he is walking in the spaces between the spots and in the breath of the "distance" that he has emphasized in his words.