Sabrina Shah | Talk to me

17 March - 22 April 2023

Claiming a right to be heard on one’s own terms, the title echoes and serves as a response to Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to Her and the presumption of power disguised as concern (1).

Shah's series of paintings often talk about living with chronic pain and are conceived as a clarion call that affirms Elinor Cleghorn's observation that "to be an unwell woman today is to fight against ingrained injustices against women’s bodies, minds and lives". The works take ownership of vulnerability and celebrate this.

Paintings made on canvas, paper and board intertwined with collage and found objects deconstruct and reconstitute the painted surface across a myriad of planes and possible spaces, destabilising familiar viewpoints and unlocking shifts in positional agency. The abundant contradictions of domestic life radiate through the world inhabited by Shah's blissfully feasting creatures. Digestibility and desire, nourishment and control, gameplay and powerplay are the shifting contours of this liminal space in which motifs and subject are atomised, disconnected and reconstituted.

Urgent marks cascade across the paintings, visceral colour intersects with text as drawing, weaving the threads of lively worlds of humans, nonhumans and more-than-human characters. In Shelf life, anthropomorphism is an uncertain experience for the figures Shah paints, sat around dinner tables vying for place among neon cakes and discounted meat labels. The work dwells on change, by contrasting comfort food that soothes, with feelings of loss and transformation. A soft toy bear and cupcake, both from bakeries and shops in London’s Chinatown are motifs from Shah’s childhood.

In several paintings, broad fields of colour create perspective-warping sections of action, energy and suspense. There is either layering of colours to achieve a soft build-up of intensity and depth, or lightly pigmented washes of colour that drip and overlap, to lend a delicate transparency. An atmosphere of stillness and drawn-out tension pervades the works. The works of surrealists Joan Miro, Dorothea Tanning and the eerie tales of Mexican author Amparo Davila have had a profound influence over Inam’s work. The latter’s uncanny, fantastic stories of the everyday, incorporate a feminist take on the horror aesthetic. Within the rich, surreal, destabilising interior spaces of Inam’s work are embedded deeply personal stories that narrate the anxiety and drama that infuses the life of a young woman today. She poignantly references her own move to a big city, her relationship with two worlds – her origin country and her new one. Several works describe the trials and tribulations of finding connection and meaning, the search for a sense of belonging and constant reconstruction of identity.

In Eye of the tiger, families are reimagined to include stand-ins and props, absences and longing defrayed by tender paintwork. Shared rituals are stripped to their essential form, revealing anxious conclusions. The sharing of food is explored in several works, which play with themes of commensality and de-othering.

Shah’s work flecks at a fractional line from shared nourishment to predation. Recognising the food chain – knowing who’s who in the zoo and precisely what’s for supper – is never entirely clear.

(1) Novoa Adriana Whose Talk Is It? Almodóvar and the Fairy Tale in Talk to Her in Marvels & Tales, Vol. 19, No 2 (2005)

Sabrina Shah (b. 1986, Worcester) graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in painting in 2022 after completing her fine art studies at the University of Brighton and the Royal Drawing School. She won the inaugural Castlegate Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the John Moores prize in 2010.

Her first solo opened at indigo+madder in March 2023. Recent exhibitions include Inside, a Two Temple Place & Thorp Stavri Exhibition, London 2023; Eve Liebe Gallery, Summer Show, 2022; Love Strata, Lychee One Gallery, London, 2021. Barbican Arts Group Trust, Whitehorse Lane, London, 2021.

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