Kazem Chalipa was born in 1957 in Tehran. His father, Hassan Esmailzadeh, was a famous coffee house painter. Kazem Chalipa's interest in painting was rooted in his father's profession and he also learned the alphabet of painting from his father. Later, he went to the Academy of Fine Arts and studied painting there until 1976. After that, he entered the Faculty of Fine Arts and continued studying painting academically. After graduating in 1989, he went to Tarbiat Modares College and received his master's degree from this university. He also holds a PhD in Art Studies.

Chalipa was an assistant professor of Dr. Javad Hamidi at Tehran University for three years and also an assistant professor of Jalil Ziapour at the University of Arts for one year. Along with painting, he worked as a lecturer in universities. Later, he became a member of Shahed University faculty. In 2003, Kazem Chalipa was selected in the second biennial painting of the Islamic world. Also, in 2013, a collection of his different artistic periods was collected and displayed in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts.

In expressing his religious, social, epic and lyrical themes, Chalipa has tried different methods from naturalistic representation to semi-abstract compositions. It can be said that his most sensitive works were created during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. The works that were painted with an epic and emotional tone in association and sympathy with advertising devices; Works praising concepts such as "martyrdom", "sacrifice" and war. In these paintings, he used religious references to Shiite symbols and narratives to give a religious color to the events of the war. During the revolution, his paintings were more inclined towards social realism (which originated from Soviet art), but gradually he turned to a kind of imaginative and poetic expression and prioritized the expression of emotions over the logic of realism. As some of his paintings from the first period depict revolutionary fighters in objective situations such as the street, on the asphalt and next to the shutters of shops, but his paintings from the war period are in an imaginary and chaotic atmosphere, among angels or holy religious figures. Chalipa himself says in describing this period of his work: "There is a kind of energy, presence and pain in them. This was the atmosphere that was created at that time and it brought many people with it. He, like other like-minded and contemporaneous painters, turned to non-political themes and poetic nature paintings after the seventies. Although, in some of them, we can find an implicit and metaphorical rejection of the war period. The collection of paintings of burnt gardens is a good example to understand the characteristics of this style of his works.