Davood Koochaki

I-L

16 Dec

Davood Koochaki was born in 1939 in Jomehbaza, in a rice-growing region of northern Iran. His family were very poor and they had to work their landowner’s fields. Koochaki, too, had to begin work when he was just seven, only teaching himself to read and write much later on. At the age of thirteen, he decided to leave his family for Teheran, where he hoped to make a better life for himself. He was hired to help in a car repair workshop and was trained as a car body repairer. At the age of 24 he started his own business. He got married in the same year and subsequently had four children. He began to draw as a hobby at the age of 40, but it was only after he retired at 60 that he pursued drawing more seriously. Koochaki’s early drawings already showed his fascination for primitive figures, animals and mysterious creatures, which he sometimes combined into an organic whole. They often resemble prehistoric cave dwellers with explicit sexual references. Birds also appear in his drawings alongside fantastical animals, sometimes mythological and half-human.

Thanks to his son-in-law’s connections, he exhibited his works for the first time in Teheran in 2008. As Koochaki uses only graphite and coloured pencils, he is nicknamed “The Pencil Man”.