Mahmoodkhan’s donkeys walk this earth as visible cries of pain, courage, and serve as examples of how to cope with cruelty and injustice. Although his dramatic and beautiful use of color belies the stories of disappointment, hurt, injustice, and frustration, the donkeys of Mahmoudkhan have a timeless grace and power.
The donkeys made by this Persian artist are not his only storytellers. There is a recurring tree (although never the same twice) that, in variation after variation, shows members of a family of birds vying for survival and haven, feeding smaller birds and eating or fighting off undulating serpents. The birds eat the snakes who eat the birds. The compositions are stark, emphasizing an inner sense of present anxieties and the fragile qualities of daily life. These birds sometimes engage the donkeys from above. Taken together there is a vivid sense of familial community.
Mahmoud Zahedi (Mahmoodkhan) was born in 1947. He was a primary school teacher until 2000 when he retired after an injury to his spinal cord. Unfortunately, the surgery was not successful, and he became partially paralyzed, restricted to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
He began to paint daily in 2016. He used the process of making art as a way of contemplating the world. He could immerse himself in observing life around him, seeing animals as metaphors for the awkwardness of human travails, identifying with their frustrations and trials, especially donkeys who he felt were on the bottom of the animal world despite their legendary testosterone and large genitals. When the world is finished with a donkey it sets the animal adrift, despite its virility, and it is forgotten in obscurity. One cannot help but see Mahmoodkhan’s unhappiness with his own physical condition reflected in these drawings.
The donkey is the common man, earthbound, physically apart from the struggle of the nest in the trees yet struggling against the same enemies and search for nourishment and safety as the birds.
Yet Mahmoodkhan responds to these conditions by using bold, beautiful, and dramatic colors to give the creatures an inner and outer power and strength to go on. The story he tells is personal, and ultimately, through his line and color, a story of survival. It is that personal aspect of his storytelling that brings his work closer to Art Brut. He is self-exorcising. He accepted his role as storyteller and was at his peak of power and creativity when he passed on in 2023 and was buried by his family on a hilltop in Gilan.