Toulu Hassani (*1984 in Ahwaz,Iran) lives and works in Cologne. She studied at the Braunschweig University of Art and at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, completing her studies with Walter Dahn. International residencies have taken her to the ISCP in New York (2014), the CCA Andratx (2019), the Blank Residency Programme in Portugal (2023) and the Maison Marcelle (2025). From 2023 to 2024, she served as an interim professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. 

She has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts (2016), the Marianne-Defet-Malerei-Grant from the Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2022), the August Macke Prize from the Hochsauerland district (2023) and the ‘Catalogue Grant from the Lower Saxony Saving Banks Trust (2027). Her works have been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions and are held in major public and private collections, including the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the ERES Foundation in Munich, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection in Munich, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal.

Toulu Hassani works in the medium of painting. She draws on cosmic and astrophysical references and raises questions about infinity, causality and spatio-temporal orders. In her work, she is faszinated by the human endeavour to describe the world. In the search for an underlying order governing everything, numerous descriptive representations have been and continue to be created, and models developed, intended to depict and explain both the visible and the invisible. Her paintings can be read as allegories for the systems of order that we humans create to find our bearings in our world, and which relate to both the microcosm and the macrocosm. In doing so, the artist sets herself the complex task of thinking both within and outside these systems: order and disorder, rationality and emotion are not mutually exclusive, any more than plan and chance are. By navigating this field of tension through her painting, the human perspective and imprecision become imprinted on her paintings.