Simin Jalilian – Simin Jalilian

68projects by KORNFELD presents the first-ever showing of new paintings by Hamburg-based Iranian artist Simin Jalilian—works that are simultaneously biographical and political, expressive and poetic. Her painting is a powerful and urgent plea for freedom, in both life and art.

Simin Jalilian’s worlds burn with intensity. Her canvases are charged with an atmosphere between fear and hope, between calming sunsets and ominous forebodings. Nothing is certain; every moment could shift and unleash something terrible. Her expressive brushstrokes keep everything in flux—not a snapshot, but scenes that resist stillness and instead unfold with the inevitability of real life.

In her painting Bitte nicht abschieben (Please Don’t Deport Me), the scene is an airport. A figure is being forced onto a plane by police and armed, uniformed personnel. “That’s me,” says Jalilian, “in my fears, in my darkest daydreams.” The artist came to Germany from Iran in 2016. She wants to stay—to continue living the freedom she has found, including the freedom in her painting.

Her style is a compelling fusion of personal inclination and biographical necessity. Even in Iran, she studied the German Neue Wilde painters. Later, in Germany, she continued her education under one of their leading figures, Werner Büttner, at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. The forceful painting style, the broad brushstrokes, and the leaning toward dirty tones and darkness recall the German-Western painting tradition of the 1980s. Yet Jalilian introduces something her predecessors largely avoided: social and political content. Through her expressionist approach, she shows what the world looks like today—for her and for many other women and displaced people.

In doing so, Jalilian resists current trends. Her visual language is neither poppy nor playful, never sleek. Instead, she chooses a form of painting that gets its hands dirty. She reclaims the previously male-dominated field of Neo-Expressionism and casts it in a sharp, fluorescent light of present-day drama.

In Flüchtlinge (Refugees), a child is being passed from one person to another. It remains unclear whether the child is arriving from a boat or whether the dangerous journey across the sea still lies ahead. The child floats at the threshold between land and water, glowing against a radiant sky—a fleeting moment of majesty in a young life. But danger looms from all sides. The child’s fate remains uncertain: survival at sea, or safety on land?

In Integration, we see a grown-up child—a woman kneels beside another as they open a beer bottle with a lighter. “When I learned to do that here in Hamburg,” Jalilian recalls, “my friend laughed and said, ‘Now you’re integrated.’” What appears light-hearted is undercut by melancholy. Faces are serious. The ground splits open, red rivulets running through it, recalling Edvard Munch’s anxiety-laden skies. Liquidity and instability extend into bodies and clothing. Jalilian’s gestural brushwork gives the painting an organic quality.

Aesthetically, Simin Jalilian moves between abstraction and figuration. Painting is not divided into outline and surface; each section of the canvas also functions as an abstract composition. This is where l’art pour l’art meets political art. Her autonomous brushwork does not diminish the figurative force—on the contrary, it intensifies the narrative urgency. Everything feels alive, as if it could dissolve at any moment. Life never stands still.

In The Wow Effect, the kinetic force of Jalilian’s painting pushes cinema-goers back into their seats even as their bodies lean forward. It becomes a struggle between the will of the figures and the hand of the artist. “These are people who let themselves be euphorically swept away by the screen,” Jalilian comments, “but who fail to see reality.”

Although Jalilian paints with realism, her painterly gestures retain their independence. She refuses to subordinate painting to pure narration. She works without models or photographs—each body emerges from imagination and lived experience. Hyperrealism and the hollow illusionism of AI-generated imagery are rejected in favor of sensual individuality and a distinctive painterly signature. In her work, painting becomes palpable, human, and intense. German expressionist traditions collide with a contemporary political world, driven by Jalilian’s fierce, paint-hungry temperament.

— Larissa Kikol

Simin Jalilian was born in 1989 in Tehran, Iran. From 2007 to 2013 she studied art at Soore University in Tehran. In 2016 she moved to Germany, continuing her studies at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg—first under Professor Werner Büttner, and since 2021 as a Master’s student with Professor Rajkamal Kahlon. In 2020 she received the HFBK Merit Scholarship for International Students, was awarded the HISCOX Art Prize in 2022, and received the Berenberg Cultural Prize in 2024. In 2023/24 her work was featured in the exhibition Dix and the Present at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.