Nahem Shoa
The London Look
Portraits 1997-2003

16 January - 22 February, 2025

William Hine is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the London-based artist Nahem Shoa (b.1968, London) on view from 16 January to 22 February, 2025.

The exhibition brings together a significant selection of the artist’s portraits spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of which have not been shown in London for nearly 25 years. Following on from his recent institutional display Nahem Shoa: Into the Light at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2023-2024), this presentation at the gallery highlights a pivotal body of work from Shoa’s early career. The seven works on view, all painted from life, document a time in which the artist was achieving a technical mastery of colour and composition in his figurative paintings, whilst subtly engaging the poignant social and political environment in which his life and work belongs.

Born in Notting Hill in 1968, Shoa was raised in one of the city’s most creative and multicultural quarters. Channeling his artistic energies in his youth amidst the graffiti and break dance scenes across West London, Shoa soon began his fine art training at home from the age of 17, under the tutelage of Plymouth painter Robert Lenkiewicz, a family friend, with whom he would study and paint alongside throughout his early career from 1986 until 1996, whilst pursuing his undergraduate studies at Medlock Fine Art school at Manchester Polytechnic university (1988-91) before going on to postgraduate study at The Royal Drawing School (2003-04).

With a deep appreciation for the slow observation attendant to painting from life and inspired by the various schools of London painters that preceded him throughout the 20th Century, Shoa committed himself wholeheartedly to a figurative tradition against the grain of conceptualism and the Young British Art movement of the era. Instead, Shoa persevered with his own form of realism, working fastidiously on self-portraits and portraits of his friends and acquaintances, fellow artists and romantic partners. From his art school days in the late 1980s painting from squatted student housing in Manchester and upon his return to the vibrant West End of the 1990s, Shoa steadily built a body of work that reflected and celebrated Britain as a diverse and cosmopolitan place, putting race and identity at the centre of his practice, at a time when the art world in which he was seeking opportunity was hesitant to do the same. This was only natural to Shoa who, born to parents of Yemeni-Eritrean and Scottish-Latvian heritage, was primed to carve out a voice in his work that he hadn’t yet seen fully reflected.

This project, first displayed in his debut museum exhibition ‘Youth Culture/Multi Culture’ at The Box, Plymouth (2004) would set the artist on a slow but steady course over the next twenty years for further institutional exhibitions and ‘interventions’ in which his archive of paintings depicting people of colour would be interspersed in historical museum collections, revealing the systemic biases and lack of diversity of public collections. The most recent of which, Seen and Unseen, brings together Shoa’s work and that of many leading figures of historic and contemporary art at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (October 2024 - January 2025). Shoa’s work is now well-represented throughout many of the UK’s public collections, with 17 of his works belonging to British museums, 15 of which depict his non-white sitters. In The London Look, the artist’s first solo exhibition in his hometown for over 20 years, we revisit the early years and building blocks of Shoa’s career, offering a reappraisal of an often overlooked British painter whose contribution to contemporary painting feels as relevant today as it ever has.

Press: 
Nahem Shoa’s London Homecoming, Plaster Magazine (January, 2025).

The Top 5 Art Exhibitions to see in London in February, FAD Magazine (February, 2025).


About the artist:

Nahem Shoa (b. 1968, London) lives and works in London. Shoa studied Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic (1988-1991) before later completing postgraduate studies at The Royal Drawing School (2003-2004). Shoa was the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield’s Foundation award (1993-2001), and was the winner of the Royal Society Of Portrait Painters award (1992) and the Lord Leighton Prize (1992-93). Shoa’s exhibition Into The Light (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) was recently selected for the landmark publication The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting 3 (Anomie Publishing, 2024).

Recent and selected solo exhibitions and curated  displays include: Seen and Unseen, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2024-25); Nahem Shoa: Into the Light, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2023-24); Face of Britain, Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton, UK (2020); Black Presence, The Atkinson, Southport, UK (2019); Facing Yourself, Bury Art Museum, Bury, UK (2006); We Are Here, The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK (2005); Giant Heads & Multi Culture, Hartlepool Art Gallery (2004) and Youth Culture/Multi Culture, Plymouth Art Gallery (The Box), Plymouth, UK (2004).

Shoa’s work belongs to numerous public collections, including: Bury Art Museum, Bury, UK; Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK; Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM), Exeter, UK; Hartlepool Museums, Hartlepool, UK; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, UK; The Box, Plymouth, UK; Sheffield Museums, Sheffield, UK; Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton, UK; The Atkinson, Southport, UK; The V&A, London, UK.

Installation Views

Artworks

Laila, c. 1998
Oil on canvas
60.9 x 50.8 cm
64.6 x 54.6 cm (framed)

Gbenga, Thinking, 1997
Oil on canvas
127 x 106.4 cm
135.4 x 115.1 cm (framed)

Sue, c. 1998
Oil on canvas
60.9 x 50.8 cm
64.6 x 54.6 cm (framed)

Michelle, c. 1999
Oil on canvas mounted on board
51 x 45 cm
55.3 x 49 cm (framed)

Ezz, c. 1997
Oil on canvas
101.5 x 91.5 cm
110.5 x 100.5 cm (framed)

Desiree Sanderson on my Blue Sofa, 2003
Oil on canvas
90 x 180 cm
98.6 x 189.8 cm (framed)

Group Scene, Notting Hill, 1999
Oil on canvas
121.9 x 91.4 cm
130 x 102.5 cm (framed)

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