In the quiet spaces of Wahed Khakdan’s paintings, time seems suspended. Empty rooms, forgotten objects, and soft light create a cinematic tension between memory and stillness. Every suitcase, window, and shadow tells a story of departure and waiting, echoing the artist’s personal experience of migration and longing.

Khakdan transforms ordinary items into emotional symbols: a broken chair becomes a witness to absence; a fading photo, a portal to the past. His art doesn’t shout, it whispers. It invites reflection on what we carry when we leave places behind, and what remains when the noise of life fades.

In an era of speed and distraction, Khakdan’s work reminds us of the poetry of pause, of how silence, too, can speak.

Brief Biography

Wahed Khakdan was born in Tehran in 1950. He studied interior architecture and began exhibiting in Iran in the 1970s. He migrated to Germany in the early 1980s, where his visual language evolved into a uniquely melancholic hyper-realism, focusing on objects laden with memory, absence and time. It was announced that he passed away yesterday, in 2025, marking the end of a profound chapter in contemporary Iranian-European art.