Known for his gigantic trompe l'oeil murals in central Tehran, Ghadyanloo has become Iran's most prolific public artist with over 100 murals around the world in the US, UK, Russia and in his native Iran.

Ghadyanloo also creates paintings, with surreal and minimalist themes. While his colourful murals have led him to be simplistically compared to Iran's answer to Banksy by the press, Ghadyanloo is more inclined to compare himself to European surrealist painters such as Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico and the minimal lines of 20th-century modernist architects such as Le Corbusier. Mehdi draws inspiration from Giorgio de Chirico, Magritte and the minimalism of Le Corbusier, and transforms them into a voice all his own.

At the request of the municipality of Tehran, from 2006, he produced more than a hundred large murals on the walls of the city.

Mehdi was born in Karaj, Iran (a suburb of Tehran) in 1981. His father was a farmer and his mother a carpet weaver. He grew up during the Iran-Iraq war where his father served as a soldier. Until the age of 18, Ghadyanloo lived and worked on the family farm in Karaj. He enrolled at the University of Tehran and studied painting at the university's faculty of fine arts. He graduated university in 2004 and then obtained a master's degree in 3D Design and Animation from Tarbiat Modares University.

In 2016, he became the first painter in over thirty years to be commissioned by both Iran and the United States. In particular, he produced a mural, Spaces of Hope, at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. In 2019, he painted Finding Hope, a mural triptych for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Building on the illusionism of his paintings and their intensity of concentration, Ghadyanloo's dramatic works on canvas differ from them in format and emphasize existential themes.

More recently, his works envision a fictional architecture of slides, tubes and children's playground ladders. Meticulously painted in acrylics and oils, mainly with an airbrush, their round shapes are defined by a chiaroscuro of lights reflected on the geometric shapes and the materials that constitute them (metal, plastic, wood). Mehdi's enigmatic and quasi-metaphysical paintings convey his Ghadyanloo fascination with perspective construction and illumination.

The Class Art Biarritz gallery offers multiple signed and numbered serigraphs by Mehdi Ghadyanloo.