Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo is back in London. Battling against the erratic British weather, Ghadyanloo has spent the last week or so on his latest masterpiece in the capital’s Docklands area: a huge mural outside a construction site near Custom House station. The work, a fluid, gentle — but also ambigious — dreamscape, suggests an artistic sensibility comfortable with changing city streets, where architectural gems sit alongside ambitious modern feats of glass and metal. The repeated images of a young girl navigating her bicycle around gaping dark holes in the road suggest something of the social ambiguities that exist in contemporary Iran and the tensions or challenges that Iranians face in everyday life.
The artist caused a storm back in February when he brought techniques favored by some of the art’s great masters to Shoreditch in London — an area packed full of graffiti art and tourists flocking to see it. His work stands out for its artistic quality — he is thought to be inspired by de Chirico and Magritte – yet he is undoubtedly a street artist, hired by the city of Tehran to take part in a “beautification” project to transform some of the gloomier parts of the city into a more welcoming space.
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