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New Work by Nahem Shoa
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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
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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. |
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Nahem Shoa’s artistic vision draws heavily on the current state of the world, climate change nature, trees, race, art history and the complex and visionary language of his subconscious imagination. Shoa creates multi coloured, layered, contemporary figurative landscape paintings that combine translucent vibrant drizzles, of paint, chunky impasto, hallucinatory colour glazes with emotional drawing marks scratched into the surface of the canvas.
The abstract, real, visible and the hidden, harmonize In these contemporary scenes that capture the zeitgeist of this present moment in history, that lingers in our collective unconscious. Strange landscapes with beautiful trees and modern Londoners inhabit Shoa’s paintings, but they are not wearing masks or pretending to be gods but simply reflecting their own natures. They wear the latest outlandish couture costumes in style of the year they were painted. They show how life often seems like a surreal spectacle, as this Covid-19 proves. These paintings are played out like grand dramas, combining elements of the notion of 'Paradise' and humanities yearning to go back to a 'Golden Age'. |
Paintings and drawings full of black humour show a darker, fearful and almost nightmarish scenario of contemporary life.
Shoa constructs his contemporary scene with theatrical flair: his figures are staged in Baroque compositions and there is always an element of spectacle, drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Art History and technique. Like, Van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, Bonnard, Doig, Matsunaga, Rauch and Ghenie, Shoa gets to the heart of the expressiveness of paint capturing a poetic vibrancy through texture, richness of colour and illusion of light. Shoa progresses the ‘obsolete’ tools of oil painting even after Warhol. Painting has always reinvigorated itself after the countless proclamations of its death. The tangible qualities in the way he uses paint seem to glue together the intangibilities of our history and yet he manages to create work of contemporary resonance. He likes to combine the obvious with the shadowy, the recognizable with the incomprehensible into dissonant units, thus transferring a lasting remembrance to the viewer's visual memory store. |
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.