Mojtaba Tajik, a painter, was born in Tehran. He is known for his photorealistic paintings, with a lot of symbolism in terms of theme.

Tajik's interest in painting was formed in his school days. In 1983, he went to Lorca's workshop and participated in Masoud Masoumi's photography classes. After the end of his military service, he went to Aydin Aghdashloo's workshop and learned to paint professionally under his supervision for four years. The influence of Aghdashloo's photography and painting style has been preserved in all the working periods of this artist. 

In 1995, he participated in the third biennial painting held at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. His first solo exhibition was in the same year at Seyhoun Gallery in Tehran. A year later, he exhibited his works in another solo exhibition in the same gallery. Tajik continued cooperating with Seyhoun Gallery until the 2000s and was continuously present in other painting biennials. In 2003, the artist made his first international appearance at the Nader Gallery in New York with a solo exhibition. In 2005, his works were also shown in Bisan Gallery in Doha. During this period, his collaboration with the Assar Gallery began. Through this gallery, he participated in the Contemporary Artfair and international art in Istanbul in 2013 and 2015.

As we said before, Tajik started his artistic activity with Photography. His interest in seeing degree zero and photographic representation originates from this point. In his paintings, he chooses pieces of the objective world as subjects and tries to recreate them by paying attention to the slightest qualities. In one of his interviews, Tajik states the close connection between his paintings' production method and photographs: "Photography for me is like sketching. Usually, painters draw and then bring their design to the canvas as a painting, and instead of drawing the subject in question, I take a photo of it and then start painting." A trait that makes his paintings fall under the photorealistic style. This view is consistent with Aghdashloo's representational style and most of the students he trained in this decade.

Most of the works he painted until the beginning of the 2000s are fragments of everyday life objects painted realistically. Most of the subjects he chose for his paintings in this period, from the rear window of the Renault car to the selling knife boxes, the keychain box, and the shoemaker's wall, carry nostalgic aspects. From the second half of the 2000s, the subjects of his representation gradually take a symbolic form. By juxtaposing incongruous elements in a wooden frame, such as a porcelain mug and a Coca-Cola can hanging above it or a paper boat and a piece of broken porcelain, he creates situations for the viewer to construct meanings from the contrast of these symbolic elements. The presence of factors such as porcelain pieces that remind of artistic traditions is somehow reminiscent of Aghdashloo's "Memories of Destruction" collection. Of course, this approach could be more stable in his works, and Tajik soon returns to the exact impartial and objective representation of the corners of life without insisting on creating meaning beyond what is visible. 

Panels such as Apartment, Simplicity, and Mailbox, created at the beginning of the 2010s, are typical examples of the works of this period. From the second half of the decade of 2015, we have seen another change in the selection of subjects, arrangement, and spatialization of this artist's works. In this series, he hangs and paints old objects, such as a piece of clothing or a chair with a thread on a gray wall. Placing elements next to each other gives a mysterious aspect to his paintings. His color options in this period are limited and muted.