Aghdashloo’s work has explored a variety of aspects of Iranian arts and culture but has particularly honored and addressed the role of women in Iranian society. As one of the few men in his generation to address this topic, his post-revolution series, Enigma, featured renaissance-era inspired portraits of women in various states of symbolic oppression and injustice. Their faces scratched or wounded, mouths covered, and identities annihilated. In continuation with his Memories of Destruction series, Mr. Aghdashloo was preoccupied with the ways in which the “ignorance of the world around was destroying all that was just and beautiful.” This manifest reflection of what Iranian society was dealing with emotionally, made his paintings not just popular in the art circles, but also amongst the Iranian public.
In Glenn Harcourt’s book The Artist, The Censor, and The Nude published in 2017, Aydin was featured as an artist who has been preoccupied by censorship in Iranian arts and culture. The piece published in the book was a diptych of a woman from the Enigma series, one of them with her head covered. Harcourt writes: “[T]he face of the sitter in the left-hand (“MORS”) panel has been scribbled out with a series of ocher-umber- brown strokes as if to indicate that identity itself (even an entire tradition of representing identity) is ‘erased’ either by death, or by the passage of cultural and political time.”
Many of Aydin Aghdashloo’s former female students have given testimony that the academy provided them a respite from their difficult living situations at home, and that in addition to helping them develop new skills, it helped with their confidence as well.
During the “Cultural Revolution” years in the 1980s, when arts and culture education was being “Islamicized” in Iran by the state, and women were being oppressed in the public by Morality Police, Aydin’s academy provided a refuge for men and women to have an equal opportunity to learn and discuss art history, theory and technique in a safe, inclusive and professional environment.