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Tangible to In-Tangible
“When a butterfly lands for 10 minutes on your drawing you know that you are totally at one with nature and she is blowing you kisses.” Nahem Shoa.
News From Nowhere 2019 Nahem Shoa
Other Worlds 2018 Nahem Shoa
New Eden 2017 Nahem Shoa
Midnight Sun 2020 Nahem Shoa
Paradise Lost 2017 Nahem Shoa
Nahem Shoa
“When a butterfly lands for 10 minutes on your drawing you know that you are totally at one with nature and she is blowing you kisses.” Nahem Shoa.
Artist, curator Nahem Shoa’s artistic vision draws on the current state of the world, climate change, nature, trees, race, myth, pollution, art history and the complex, visionary language of his subconscious imagination to make a new kind of contemporary painting that addresses all the major issues of the 21st century.
Shoa is already well known for his contemporary portraits of British Black people of colour which are and have been in pioneering exhibitions in Regional Museums and Art Galleries in Britain on the theme of identity and race. Since 2004 Shoa’s portraits are in the collections of Manchester City Art Gallery, The Laing, Newcastle, The Hatton, Newcastle, RAMM, Exeter, The Box, Plymouth, and Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries. The Herbert, Coventry, Southampton City Art Gallery, Bury Art Gallery, Christ Church Art Gallery Hartlepool, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The Atkinson, Southport, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and V&A, London.
Race and Identity is one of Shoa’s on going themes in his work, as racism is still an issue.
Shoa has been painting and drawing trees for over 30 years as they have always fascinated him. He has tried to use his portrait painter’s scrutiny to make powerful portraits of them, trying to convey each tree’s individuality and spirit. When he looks at nature it is trees that always grab his attention and make him want to make art. He has always worked directly from the motif, as a starting point and that’s meant many hours in all weathers, seeing nature alive, changing all the time in a constant state of revelation. This research is the inspiration that unlocks his unconscious vision in new work.
Shoa creates multi coloured, layered, contemporary landscape paintings, with Londoners in them, conveying nature meeting the urban jungle. He structures his paintings by combining translucent vibrant drizzles of paint, chunky impasto, abstract flatness, hallucinatory colour glazes with emotional drawing marks scratched into the surface of the canvas. Underpinning this apparent wildness is a disciplined formal rigour of a highly skilled realist painter.
Hybrid landscapes with strange, beautiful trees and modern Londoners inhabit Shoa’s paintings, but the people are not playing the role of gods, like you find in old master paintings, but simply reflecting their own individuality. He paints them wearing the latest couture costumes in the style of the day. Shoa, by using fashion magazines and fashionable clothed shop display dummies as a starting point to dress his semi imaginary figures links them to the present moment in history and time. They show how life in all its strangeness, often seems like a surreal spectacle, as this Covid-19 time has proven, with lockdowns, innumerable deaths, mask wearing and a fear of getting close to people.
We live in a world where advancing technologies are taking over the way we live our lives. Social media has on the one hand opened the world up for everyone, by giving everyone a voice, but this freedom without responsibility has seen an increase in racism, hatred and climate change deniers, for example. It has also created a Frankenstein monster called the ‘Selfie’, which has made grotesque narcism mainstream.
When as a society we keep chasing false gods, the superficial mask more than reality, then we are on a journey that has never ended well for humanity, but it is easy to sell as it involves no self development and learning for individuals.
“This is precisely the time for me as an artist to create new stories from this new reality and turn it into art to raise awareness of us walking blindly into the abyss”. Nahem Shoa
It is important to realise whilst Shoa was painting his three metre landscapes of trees, millions of trees were burning around the world, on an apocalyptic level never seen before.
By inventing a parallel world of his imagination that reflects back the real world of today to us through implied narratives and myth, Shoa wants to wake up the viewer to the beauty and fragility of the world around us, awaken us to try and avoid a climate catastrophe.
Artist, curator Nahem Shoa’s artistic vision draws on the current state of the world, climate change, nature, trees, race, myth, pollution, art history and the complex, visionary language of his subconscious imagination to make a new kind of contemporary painting that addresses all the major issues of the 21st century.
Shoa is already well known for his contemporary portraits of British Black people of colour which are and have been in pioneering exhibitions in Regional Museums and Art Galleries in Britain on the theme of identity and race. Since 2004 Shoa’s portraits are in the collections of Manchester City Art Gallery, The Laing, Newcastle, The Hatton, Newcastle, RAMM, Exeter, The Box, Plymouth, and Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries. The Herbert, Coventry, Southampton City Art Gallery, Bury Art Gallery, Christ Church Art Gallery Hartlepool, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The Atkinson, Southport, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and V&A, London.
Race and Identity is one of Shoa’s on going themes in his work, as racism is still an issue.
Shoa has been painting and drawing trees for over 30 years as they have always fascinated him. He has tried to use his portrait painter’s scrutiny to make powerful portraits of them, trying to convey each tree’s individuality and spirit. When he looks at nature it is trees that always grab his attention and make him want to make art. He has always worked directly from the motif, as a starting point and that’s meant many hours in all weathers, seeing nature alive, changing all the time in a constant state of revelation. This research is the inspiration that unlocks his unconscious vision in new work.
Shoa creates multi coloured, layered, contemporary landscape paintings, with Londoners in them, conveying nature meeting the urban jungle. He structures his paintings by combining translucent vibrant drizzles of paint, chunky impasto, abstract flatness, hallucinatory colour glazes with emotional drawing marks scratched into the surface of the canvas. Underpinning this apparent wildness is a disciplined formal rigour of a highly skilled realist painter.
Hybrid landscapes with strange, beautiful trees and modern Londoners inhabit Shoa’s paintings, but the people are not playing the role of gods, like you find in old master paintings, but simply reflecting their own individuality. He paints them wearing the latest couture costumes in the style of the day. Shoa, by using fashion magazines and fashionable clothed shop display dummies as a starting point to dress his semi imaginary figures links them to the present moment in history and time. They show how life in all its strangeness, often seems like a surreal spectacle, as this Covid-19 time has proven, with lockdowns, innumerable deaths, mask wearing and a fear of getting close to people.
We live in a world where advancing technologies are taking over the way we live our lives. Social media has on the one hand opened the world up for everyone, by giving everyone a voice, but this freedom without responsibility has seen an increase in racism, hatred and climate change deniers, for example. It has also created a Frankenstein monster called the ‘Selfie’, which has made grotesque narcism mainstream.
When as a society we keep chasing false gods, the superficial mask more than reality, then we are on a journey that has never ended well for humanity, but it is easy to sell as it involves no self development and learning for individuals.
“This is precisely the time for me as an artist to create new stories from this new reality and turn it into art to raise awareness of us walking blindly into the abyss”. Nahem Shoa
It is important to realise whilst Shoa was painting his three metre landscapes of trees, millions of trees were burning around the world, on an apocalyptic level never seen before.
By inventing a parallel world of his imagination that reflects back the real world of today to us through implied narratives and myth, Shoa wants to wake up the viewer to the beauty and fragility of the world around us, awaken us to try and avoid a climate catastrophe.
A film commissioned in 2024 by the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, Nahem Shoa - In The Studio, directed and made by filmmaker and artist Alan Silvester. This moving film describes Shoa's work and studio practise.
Nahem Shoa Studio Visit Walker Art Gallery
Nahem Shoa
Covid Odyssey (Seen But Not Seen)
Covid Odyssey is a series of coloured pencil paintings that explore the mythic stories around the Cover 19 pandemic: the metaphor of entering the dark forest into the unknown and our future destiny. Black lives Matter, Climate Change, Covid 19 and polluting our fragile planet with our waste all feed into the narrative of these works. We are all on a journey due to the pandemic, that has brought out all the injustices in our society, which have been seen but not seen. My characters in these paintings including myself are wearing the rainbow symbol of diversity, and are partly being hidden by the leaves preventing them from being seen, which reflects how society has kept certain people invisible. My work has always been about shining light on what deserves to be seen, but due to racism and class have been kept hidden.
Seen but not seen Self Portrait
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Into the Forest
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Yaya in the urban forest
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Man of Sorrows
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Out of the shadows
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Seen but not seen
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Nahem Shoa "I am delighted to have been invited to be a member of the Arborealists in 2019".
The tree drawings I made last year have culminated in large 3 metre contemporary paintings, that are about nature meeting the city, the urban jungle. I populate these paintings with multi cultural figures to convey London’s diversity, street style and on a more important level, our ever-increasing fragile relationship with nature as a society today. I am trying to make a new kind of paintings for he 21st century. The Forest is a fragile thing; whilst I was drawing trees, millions of acres of forests around the world were being destroyed by huge forest fires," Nahem Shoa
Click to see more tree paintings
Click to see more tree paintings
Paradise Lost 2017 and The Wild Abyss 2017 was part of a group show Into The Wild Abyss, based on John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. Nahem Shoa exhibited his work with artists Gordon Cheung and Rui Matsunaga at The Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, June - September 2017.
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Art and Life in London during Covid-19, 2020
Nahem Shoa talks about Living and painting, drawing in London 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. His themes are about climate change, environment and our fragile relationship with nature at this present moment in history and race. For the 30 last years Shoa has been paintings about race. His portraits of himself and his friends from BME backgrounds.They were ahead of their times. Racism was so systemic, that these paintings were not giving their true significance at the time he painted them. Both his artistic concerns. capture the major of our current times. |