He draws with a ballpoint pen. Not as a gimmick — as a discipline. A ballpoint cannot be erased, cannot be lightened, cannot be undone. Every line is a decision you are stuck with.

Ebrin Bagheri was born in 1983 and works in Toronto. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from York University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD, and a diploma from George Brown — a Canadian education laid over an Iranian one, which turns out to be the subject as much as the biography.

His large-scale drawings borrow the density of Persian miniature painting: the patience, the detail, the way the eye is made to travel rather than land. Motifs from Qajar-era painting surface throughout. So does Persian poetry, which he reads constantly and which shapes the work more than any visual source does.

What he does with that inheritance is the interesting part. In Eastern Desires (2014–2017) he draws Iranian men in intimate scenes — some contemporary, some pulled from archives predating Iran's modern period. Bathhouse settings. Gestures of closeness. A register of masculinity that existed in Persian visual culture long before Western categories arrived to sort it. In Someone Who Is Like No-One (2017–2018) the same delicate technique is interrupted by images that don't belong, and the subject becomes not-belonging itself.

The recent work moves into colour and gold leaf, borrowing the composition of religious icons — a haloed figure, attendant wings, a crowd arranged in worship — with a young man in a striped swimsuit standing where the saint should be.

The work argues that the way Iranian men are pictured now is recent, and that older pictures exist.

He has shown in group exhibitions across Iran and Canada, and held a solo show in Tehran.