Kimia Ferdowsi Kline (b. 1984, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) is an Iranian-American painter based in New York whose work brings together figuration, memory, intimacy, and mythic atmosphere. Trained at Washington University in St. Louis and later at the San Francisco Institute, where she completed her MFA in visual arts in 2011, Kline develops paintings that move between personal experience and broader cultural memory, often through images that feel emotionally direct yet deliberately unresolved.
Her practice is shaped by the tension between softness and insistence: figures, gestures, and symbolic forms appear within compositions that suggest inner states as much as external scenes. Across her work, the body becomes a site for reflection on love, vulnerability, transformation, and the persistence of image-making as a way of thinking through experience. Kimia Ferdowsi Kline has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery in New York, Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, and The Elaine L. Jacobs Gallery at Wayne State University in Detroit.
She was resident artist at 68projects in Berlin in September 2017 and later appeared in the residency exhibition We might not have a planet left soon at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin.
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline (b. 1984, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) is an Iranian-American artist based in New York. She earned a BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and completed her MFA in visual arts at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. Her practice has developed across painting and related image-based forms, with a sustained interest in how emotional states, memory, and intimacy can be held within a figurative language that remains open, ambiguous, and psychologically charged.
Kline's paintings move between the personal and the symbolic without resolving the tension between them. Figures and motifs appear in ways that feel tender but never fixed, allowing the work to shift between portraiture, myth, and inward reflection. Rather than treating narrative as illustration, she uses it as a pressure within the image, so that meaning emerges through atmosphere, gesture, and relation. The work carries a classical clarity in its presentation while remaining visibly contemporary in its looseness and vulnerability. This balance gives her paintings a sense of emotional immediacy without reducing them to autobiography. Her work has been discussed in publications including Hyperallergic, It's Nice That, and Cultured Mag, and she curates the permanent art collection of the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.
In September 2017, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline was resident artist at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. That same year, her work was included in the group exhibition We might not have a planet left soon at 68projects, curated by artist and curator Adrianne Rubenstein during Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition brought together nine painters working through abstraction, figuration, and the emotional weight of image-making at a moment of collective uncertainty. Later, in November 2017, Kline participated in the two-person exhibition Soul Mate at 68projects, alongside Iranian-Danish artist Farshad Farzankia, a presentation that explored how figurative painting holds resonance across social and personal contexts, and how the personal becomes political through charged emotional tensions between figures. She also appeared in the anniversary group exhibition Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD (21 June to 24 August 2024). Her practice continues to unfold as a searching and formally sensitive engagement with the figure, memory, and the emotional architecture of painting.
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Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD – Groupshow
21 Jun - 24 Aug 2024 68projectsARTISTSRead more
Dawit Abebe, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, Cristina BanBan, Yevgeniya Baras, William Bradley, Giorgio Celin, Chris Engman, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Seong Joon Hong, Chris Hood, Michael John Kelly, Alexander Kroll, Doron Langberg, Sandeep Mukherjee, Jennifer Packer, Adrianne Rubenstein, Kyungmi Shin, Levan Songulashvili, Panos Tsagaris, Rachel Eulena Williams & Liat Yossifor
INFORMATION
On 21 June, we will showcase 21 works by the 21 artists who have been our guests as artists-in-residence over the past 10 years of 68projects by KORNFELD – with ‘Berlin on My Mind’. We are celebrating our 10 years with 68projects by KORNFELD and the 10 years of our artist-in-residence program, but also our future, which we hope to keep creating in Berlin. In Berlin, international artists look for new perspectives, a place where ideas mingle
Opening: June 21 2024, 6 pm
Exhibition: June 21 – August 24 2024, Tue – Sat, 11 am – 6 pm
68projects by KORNFELD, Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin -
Pack den Badeanzug ein – Groupshow
27 Jun - 31 Aug 2019 KORNFELD GalerieIncluding works by Alicia Adamerovich, Elvira Bach, Carlo D'Anselmi, Monika Kim Garza, Stefanie Gutheil, Erik Hanson, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Tamara Kvesitadze, Clemencia Labin, Kat Lyons, Christian Perdix, Logan T. Sibrel, James Ulmer and othersRead more
Few songs have managed to capture the lightheartedness and exuberance of summer in the way that the German hit song “Pack die Badehose ein” (“Pack Your Swimsuit”) did in the early 1950s. The teen star Conny sings about the small burdens of everyday life, which can be removed simply by jumping into the cold water of the Wannsee lake.
We are pleased to present the exhibition “Pack den Badeanzug ein” , a refreshing look at both emerging and established positions in contemporary painting. Featuring a broad selection of artistic methods, we push the boundaries of what painting can be in the 21st century. What is the state of arts oldest medium in today's hyper-digitized world? What can the analogue image do that the digital cannot, and how do the two media influence each other? -
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline & Farshad Farzankia – Soul Mate
10 Nov 2017 - 13 Jan 2018 68projectsSoul Mate is a two-person exhibition of Kimia Ferdowsi Kline and Farshad Farzankia. Both artists are Iranian, while Ferdowski lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y., USA, and Farshad lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Though the artists' approaches differ, they are both concerned with questions of abstraction, figuration, and the iconographic body’s experience from intimate and graphic perspectives. 68projects is excited to participate in this conversation about how figurative painting holds resonance across social and personal contexts. They create a dialogue about how the personal becomes political through charged emotional tensions between two figures in an embrace and two figures across the table in a discussion. Both painters remind us that the conversation between me and the other power is never out of the question in this dialectic of intimacy and negotiation.Read more -
We might not have a planet left soon – Groupshow
27 Apr - 5 Aug 2017 68projectsYevgeniya Baras, Gina Beavers, Katherine Bradford, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Jackie Gendel, Pam Glick, Joanne Greenbaum, Maia Ruth Lee, Dona NelsonRead more
Following an invitation by 68projects, the American artist, curator and director of CANADA gallery Adrianne Rubenstein selected nine ambiguous artists for the art exhibition. We might not have a planet left soon that we are showing during Gallery Weekend. The collection is a soliloquy about painting. The time it takes to make something. Colour and form. Dedication. As the planet unravels, which it’s always been doing at every stage, you plant a flower, and it is beautiful. The more beautiful, the more, in contrast, it is with its background. A flower in outer space or a flower growing out of a broken brick wall.“
