Mehrdad Rashidi was born in the town of Sari in Northern Iran in 1963. At the age of
20 he fled Iran because of his strongly held political views and settled in Germany. In
2006, for no particular reason, he began to draw. He found it relaxed him and made
him feel happy, he also thought of his homeland, his childhood and easier times in his
life whilst he doodled on any piece of paper that came to hand. Using old notebooks,
envelopes, shopping receipts and discarded advertising pamphlets, he gradually, in
what seems to be an obsessive and compulsive surge of creativity, began to produce
an extraordinary, and hauntingly beautiful body of work. This outpouring has contin-
ued to this day, the momentum, and the joy it has given the artist have not ceased.
Striking imagery and expressive detail
combine in the work of this genuine out-
sider artist. A wonderful discovery.
John Maizels: Founder of Raw Vision Magazine,
author of Raw Creation: Outsider Art & Beyond
These are truly beautiful works, with a
subtlety and uncanny presence that
speak anew with each approach from
the open viewer. They are windows into
another psychic place.
Professor Colin Rhodes is Dean of Sydney College of
the Arts, University of Sydney and author of Outsider
Art: Spontaneous Alternatives
The 'master of stitching,' Mehrdad
Rashidi, creates human or animal fig-
ures by a subtle technique: onto the sur-
face of the drawing he transposes a
process akin to knitting, tracing with his
pen a network of stitches, which, inter-
woven one with another, give birth to
delicate, haunting images.
Sarah Lombardi. Director, Collection de l'Art Brut,
Eyes, noses, lips, features perhaps,
faces just about, looping all over the
page in suits of bodyless armour. The
battalion is ready but clearly unable to
move, a doodle adrift in the land of the
well-formed, the well-intentioned and
the well-behaved.
James Brett. Director, The Museum of Everything
'His sketches... are tokens of an insight
into the mechanisms of desire and po-
etic transcendence'.
Professor Roger Cardinal, author of Outsider Art
The visual shock of this powerful work
combines a sense both of confinement
and of fullness. As if we were at the end
of a long path leading to a biological
metamorphosis, or, one might say, to
the peaceful reconciling of animal
species into a single hybrid body, as
beautiful as it is unsettling.
Bruno Decharme.  ABCD Collection, Paris
Cover Image 16 x 12 ins ink on paper. 
Collection Museum of Everything, London
HENRY BOXER GALLERY
www.outsiderart.co.uk

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