Bahram Hajou‘s path to painting was a winding one. Born in Deruna, northern Syria, in 1952, he went to Iraq in the 1970s and began to study Civil Engineering in Nauperdan und Sulemanie in 1972. Just a year later he moved to Baghdad to study Art. In 1974 he fled from the war via Prague to Berlin. From 1976 onwards he studied in Münster. Initially he enrolled for Archaeology at the University of Münster, then in 1977 he changed to the College of Education to study Sports and Art. In 1983 he completed his studies and graduated. Following a brief period of teaching at the Gesamtschule Ückendorf, a comprehensive school in Gelsenkirchen, he has devoted himself to fine arts since the early 1990s.

Bahram Hajou studied at the Münster department of the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and after graduating became a master student of Professor Norbert Tadeusz. He had his first solo exhibition in 1983 at the museum in Bochum. Bahram Hajou has long been an internationally recognised artist. He lives and works in Münster but also spends time working in New York and Paris. In 2014 he was awarded the Henry Matisse Prize by the Château Musée Grimaldi in France.

Bahram Hajou is regarded as one of the great figurative painters of our time.  Since the mid 1980s Bahram Hajou has had more than 90 exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Locations include: Doha, Dubai, Riyadh, Damascus, Cracow, London, Vienna, Budapest, Puebla (Mexico), Paris, London, Antwerp, Graz and New York. His works are on display in many museums. Since 2012 five large-format paintings have been hanging in the Museum of Qatar.