Houshang Pezeshknia was born in Tehran in 1917. During his adolescence, he studied at the Military School (Madreseh-ye Nezam, 1932), where his friendships with two pupils of Kamal-ol-Molk sparked his initial interest in painting. After completing higher education in history and geography, he traveled to Turkey in 1942 at the age of twenty-five. There, he studied painting and the history of modernist art under the French-born artist Léopold Lévy at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. He subsequently returned to Tehran and joined the circle of pioneers of Iranian modern art.

 

Pezeshknia’s first exhibition experience was in 1944, in collaboration with Hossein Taherzadeh Behzad, at the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul. He later held his first solo exhibition at the Iran–Britain Cultural Relations Association in Tehran. His collaboration with Apadana: Kashaneh-ye Honarhaye Ziba, Iran’s first private gallery, provided a crucial platform for his recognition and growing reputation within the cultural and artistic circles of the period. In December 1949, Apadana Gallery dedicated its second official exhibition to Pezeshknia’s works; it was on this occasion that figures such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad publicly praised his paintings. In January of the same year, works by Pezeshknia were also shown in Apadana Gallery’s third program, alongside those of Hossein Kazemi, Ahmad Esfandiari, Jalil Ziapour, and others.

 

Throughout his professional career, Pezeshknia pursued a wide range of artistic experiments. Traces of Expressionism, Cubism, and Impressionism—styles widely embraced by Iranian modernists of those decades—can be identified across different phases of his work. Some of his experimental approaches opened new horizons for other Iranian painters. Artists of his generation sought to draw upon the capacities of traditional arts in order to arrive at an expression that was simultaneously modern and indigenous, and Pezeshknia made notable efforts in this direction. Parviz Kalantari has described Pezeshknia as an initiator of calligraphic painting in Iran, arguing that he was the first painter to recognize the aesthetic potential of script and to test its expressive possibilities within a modernist pictorial framework.

 

It should also be noted that in 1948, like many cultural figures of his generation, Pezeshknia joined the oil industry in order to secure a livelihood and relocated to Abadan—a move that proved to be a turning point in both his personal and artistic life. It was in Abadan that he met Ebrahim Golestan, with whom he formed a close and enduring friendship. His decade-long residence there provided the conditions for the creation of some of his most significant works. The ethnographic paintings he produced during this period—depicting oil workers, villagers, and nomadic communities—are regarded as among the most important achievements of his career. His distinctly expressive manner during these years was closely intertwined with social sensitivity; in this sense, he may be considered the first Iranian modernist painter to combine social commitment with formal experimentation. These ethnographic works also served as a response to criticisms from contemporary realist painters who, influenced by Soviet socialist realism, accused modernist tendencies of lacking social and political engagement.

 

Following several scattered exhibitions within Abadan’s artistic circles, Pezeshknia undertook one of his final professional activities with a trip to Europe in 1960, during which he exhibited his most recent works in London and Paris. Two years later, after the sudden death of his brother and the intensification of the psychological crises that followed, his artistic activity gradually ceased. The remaining years of Houshang Pezeshknia’s life were spent in relative isolation, until his death in 1972 in Tehran due to a heart attack.