Behrang Karimi

Behrang Karimi (b. 1980, Shiraz, Iran) lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2015, where he studied with Professors Albert Oehlen and Peter Doig. Behrang Karimi’s works exist within a dimension of intuition.

His paintings emerge from an inner, intimate space, evoking moments of pause and contemplation. Personal images, rooted in experiences and memories, tend toward the metaphorical, lending them a certain abstraction despite their engagement with figuration. In his exploration of painting and its possibilities, Karimi employs various tonalities, moods, and gestures of the medium. Image-making becomes a performance seeking the fragile moment when a mood or a memory materializes. His paintings play with transparency and luminosity; figures emerge frontally, carrying an almost religious intensity, absorbed in introspection as everything around them dissolves into ambivalent scenes between violence, devotion, and intimacy.

His work has been exhibited, with solo exhibitions at TRAMPS, London (2025); Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen (2025); Morena di Luna, Hove (2025); Ermes Ermes, Rome (2024, 2022); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2024); Melas Martinos, Athens (2023); Maureen Paley & Studio M, London (2023); Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne (2022); and Braunsfelder, Cologne (2021). His work has also been shown in group exhibitions at April in Paris, Aerdenhout (2024); Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden, Thirsk (2024); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem (2024); The Warehouse, Dallas (2023); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2021); and MISC.Athens (2021), among others.