Drawing Runner Up 2026

Hanie Soltani

Eyes Wide Open

Jackson's Art Prize 2026
Pencil
Paper
35 x 40 cm

£1,200

“I work simultaneously across several projects, drawing on the color sensibilities and compositional logic of Iranian painting while engaging with figurative Western traditions. I am interested in painting from people and the traces they leave: bodies, objects and interiors that register everyday life and the effects of human presence. Through layered color,pattern and texture I try to impose a measured attention, a kind of control, on a world that feels loud and chaotic. My paintings move between the observed and the imagined. Some works grow from direct study of the body and stilllife; others assemble unreal, diaristic compositions shaped by personal and social experience. Fragmented figures and hybrid environments create liminal spaces where memory, desire and social constraint meet. Ultimately I am making a personal vocabulary for thinking about painting, the body and the material world, one that is rooted in tradition but resolutely contemporary. To see everything and be unable to speak or intervene is its own violence. The weight of what is witnessed settles in the body, turning grief into a quiet, relentless ache that has no outlet, no permission to be heard.”