Mehrdad Rashidi was born in the city of Sari, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. An opponent of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he went into exile in 1983, crossing Pakistan and Afghanistan to reach Russia, where he lived for five years. He then moved to Germany, where he was granted political refugee status.

He began drawing at the age of forty-three and practiced daily on scraps of paper, envelopes, and book covers. His pictorial world is reminiscent of calligraphy and traditional Iranian ornamental art. Yet, in his drawings, Mehrdad Rashidi develops highly original motifs, primarily human heads and faces intertwined with one another, which emerge with a very personal figurative logic. Mehrdad Rashidi also writes poems and texts, which he sometimes incorporates into his artwork.