Vahed Khakdan, Master of Hyperrealism, Dies at 75

Date: 24 October 2025 - 22:13

News ID: ۱۴۴۹۹۲

TEHRAN -- The Iranian painter Vahid Khakdan, a pioneer of hyperrealism and one of the country’s most accomplished visual artists, has passed away at the age of 75.
The Iranian Painters Association confirmed his death on Thursday, expressing deep sorrow over the loss of “a devoted artist whose meticulous vision and quiet mastery expanded the language of realism in Iranian art.”
Khakdan had been battling esophageal cancer for several months. He was hospitalized at Jam Hospital in early Mehr (late September) and spent his final days in intensive care.
Born in 1949, Khakdan graduated from Tehran’s School of Fine Arts for Boys in 1971 and later studied Interior Architecture at the Faculty of Decorative Arts, from which he graduated in 1976. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to Germany, where he continued his artistic journey, dividing his later life between Europe and Iran.
Khakdan’s work, rooted in hyperrealism, elevated the mundane — household objects, worn tools, fragments of daily life — into sites of meditation. His paintings did not merely replicate the visible world but revealed the unseen life within objects: their silence, memory, and weight of use. In his celebrated oil-on-canvas piece Forgiveness, a simple vessel or discarded object becomes a vessel of transcendence, both intimate and monumental.
His first solo exhibition at Seihoun Gallery in 1974 marked the beginning of a long career characterized by refinement and restraint. Over the years, his canvases found increasing recognition at major auctions and among collectors, appreciated for their stillness, clarity, and reverence for form.