Simin Jalilian Iran, b. 1989

Simin Jalilian was born in 1989 in Tehran, Iran. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Painting at Soore University in Tehran between 2007 and 2013. In 2016 she relocated to Germany, continuing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK) under Professor Werner Büttner, before completing an MA in Fine Arts in 2025 under Professor Rajkamal Kahlon. The encounter between Iranian academic painting and the critically charged atmosphere of the Hamburg art scene has shaped a practice that is formally rigorous and conceptually layered.

Jalilian's paintings operate at the intersection of the personal and the political. Working from memory, press imagery, and television footage rather than direct observation, she constructs figurative scenes that carry the weight of lived experience without the detachment of documentation. Her brushwork is dynamic and deliberately unresolved, her palette built from what critics have described as "dirty colors" that resist the decorative. In Please Don't Deport, one of the most discussed works from her 2025 Berlin debut, she places herself within a deportation scene at an airport, making visible the precarity that shadows the lives of many immigrants. The result is a body of work that draws on the expressive figuration of German Neo-Expressionism while evolving it with a distinctly diasporic and feminist urgency.

Jalilian's institutional recognition has grown steadily alongside her practice. In 2020 she received the Achievement Grant Award for International Students from the HFBK Hamburg. In 2022 she was awarded the Hiscox Art Prize in Hamburg, and in 2024 the Berenberg Cultural Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious awards for emerging artists in the fine arts. In 2026 she was nominated for the STRABAG Art Award in Vienna. Her works have entered the collections of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Kunstsammlung Berliner Volksbank.

Jalilian has exhibited widely across Germany and Iran. Early group presentations at galleries in Tehran between 2013 and 2015 established her presence within the Iranian contemporary art scene before her move to Europe. In Germany, key group exhibitions include "Old Story" at Kanister, Hamburg (2020), "ArtStadt," Hamburg (2022), and "Dix and the Present" ("Dix und die Gegenwart") at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2023/24), a major institutional show placing her work in dialogue with the legacy of Otto Dix. Further presentations include "EXIL: Kunst ohne Grenzen" at Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin (2025), and "The Art of Two" at Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin (2026).

Simin Jalilian is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. In 2025, the gallery presented her debut solo exhibition in Berlin at 68projects by KORNFELD, drawing critical attention as a visceral and politically urgent body of new paintings. The same year, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented her work at Art Cologne under the New Positions programme and at Abu Dhabi Art Fair in the UAE, extending her reach into the international art market. Jalilian's practice continues to deepen its investigation into displacement, identity, and the politics of the body.