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Artist Nahem Shoa's autobiography, Into The Light shines a light on the life of an artist growing up in the Notting Hill area of London.
"On October 5th 2023, a day after my 55th birthday, I am standing in the Private View of my Intervention Display Into The Light at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, with my family, Inma, my mother Myrna and friends Desiree, Gbenga, Ziggy, Dan, Tom.
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In 1990, aged 20, I was on a Manchester Art School trip, with fellow
BA students, to visit nearby northern galleries in Oldham, Bolton and Huddersfield; we ended the excursion by going to Liverpool and visiting the magnificent Walker Art Gallery’s world-class collection. From that day it has been a museum I have loved and dreamed about one day exhibiting in. The Walker’s painting The Two Jamaican Girls by Augustus John,, stood out on that first visit. |
It has been an inspiration for me and my art practice, as it was one of the first black portraits I ever saw painted without prejudice and well observed, without preconceived ideas of how black skin looks. That is a rare thing even today. Now, in November 2023, as I write this introduction, my giant head of Gbenga in Shadow is hanging in the Walker next to this double portrait. Dreams can come true." (C)
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Nahem Shoa Acknowledgements
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British artist Nahem Shoa's autobiography Into The Light tells the colourful story of his life and art journey, starting from his growing up in Notting Hill, West London from the 1970's to his life now. Shoa from 1982 was an early pioneer in the British Graffiti and Hip-Hop scene part of London's Ladbroke Grove's BreakJam Krew, hanging out with the KREW. From 1986 he was classically trained by artist Robert Lenkiewicz. Shoa began using this new art knowledge to portray his own diverse world.
Having dyslexia, facing racism throughout his life, instead of holding him back, Shoa makes his life's work a positive celebration of race and identity. He paints portraits of his friends and himself in a 10-year project called, Youth Culture / Multi Culture reflecting the rich diversity of the UK. After years of this work not being seen as a relevant part of contemporary art dialogue, Shoa's startling portraits of people of colour, directly painted from life are now being championed as brilliant, significant paintings. Today these portraits are being shown at the same time in eight of the most important museums across Britain. https://nahemshoapaintings.weebly.com/ |
Into the Light: An Intervention Display Exhibition - Nahem Shoa 6 Oct 2023--31 Aug 2024
Into the Light will see six of Nahem Shoa’s paintings displayed beside famous artworks from the Walker’s permanent collections – including artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, David Hockney, Lucien Freud and James Tissot.
Asking uncomfortable questions related to Transatlantic slavery, Liverpool’s cotton industry and the objectification of women in art, Into the Light will see six of Nahem Shoa’s paintings displayed beside famous artworks from the Walker’s permanent collections – including artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, David Hockney, Lucien Freud and James Tissot.
Shoa’s intervention also celebrates the Walker Art Gallery’s newest acquisition by the artist, The back of Gbenga Ilumoka’s Head. This ground-breaking and provocative painting is part of Shoa’s pioneering body of work around themes of race, identity, diversity - and the importance of celebrating British multiculturalism.
Into the Light will see six of Nahem Shoa’s paintings displayed beside famous artworks from the Walker’s permanent collections – including artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, David Hockney, Lucien Freud and James Tissot.
Asking uncomfortable questions related to Transatlantic slavery, Liverpool’s cotton industry and the objectification of women in art, Into the Light will see six of Nahem Shoa’s paintings displayed beside famous artworks from the Walker’s permanent collections – including artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, David Hockney, Lucien Freud and James Tissot.
Shoa’s intervention also celebrates the Walker Art Gallery’s newest acquisition by the artist, The back of Gbenga Ilumoka’s Head. This ground-breaking and provocative painting is part of Shoa’s pioneering body of work around themes of race, identity, diversity - and the importance of celebrating British multiculturalism.
What's On The Guide Nahem Shoa
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Studio visit Nahem Shoa
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Review: Into the Light: And Intervention by Nahem Shoa at Walker Art Gallery
In almost every room of the Walker Art Gallery, Nahem Shoa’s paintings, some new, some not, replace disputed masterpieces. The intervention is a clever new way to contextualise and personalise an historic fine art collection, and it’s really worth exploring.
Responding first to the lack of Black artists in the Walker’s collection, Shoa’s work inserts itself alongside recognisable works, depicting family life, friendships and portraiture. At face value, it’s a clear statement that the subject of nearly all of the works on display at the Walker are not specific to any culture.
But there’s also a thread worth pulling, about how the works that each of Nahem Shoa’s paintings relate to have influenced him as an artist, whether its as a direct reference for the structure of a painting, or as a cue to how to approach certain subjects.
‘Giant Head of Gbenga’, the painting that gives the intervention its title, ‘Into The Light’, is part of a series of giant heads, designed to bring the sitter and portrait painter closer together. The light, caught on Gbenga’s head bounces back into the gallery space, not only bringing the sitter out of shadows, but distinctly into contact with the viewer too.
It’s personal, and the fact the painting is named for its sitter, sets it very much apart from the most significant work used as a counterpart in this intervention.
The painting sits next to Augustus John’s ‘Two Jamaican Girls’. The painting shows two girls, unnamed, both bored, both probably unaware of Augustus John’s reasons for being there. The painter was apparently in favour of abolition, but the result is a painting that shows two girls who were, functionally, being used as a tool, in a painting where no context is given to their background, story, or anything else.
This painting, with all the mystery that surrounds it, is the only portrait of Black people in the permanent display at Walker Art Gallery.
So Gbenga’s giant head is doing a massive amount of work. It doesn’t just highlight the need for more diverse representation in this collection, and on these walls. It offers the first, literally, encounter with a Black body. It means that when you walk into the Walker, you find a named, willing, sitter, being painted by a painter who cared about representing them. And you get there before you get to ‘Two Jamaican Girls’.
Through the rest of the gallery, there are depictions of Shoa’s friends and extended family, as well as professional sitters. They are placed alongside and in reference to paintings that share their themes, and in every case they bring the experience of seeing the historic paintings into the present.
There are objects and paintings that have remained in the same spot on the Walker’s walls since I was a child, trapsing round on school trips. So if, like me, you’re familiar with the Walker’s collection displays to the point of indifference, Nahem Shoa’s multiple interventions are a brilliant way to reignite a passion for the paintings you’ve started floating past between the entrance and the temporary exhibitions.
Into The Light: An Intervention by Nahem Shoa was on free display until 12th August 2024
Words, Kathryn Wainwright (Art In Liverpool)
Responding first to the lack of Black artists in the Walker’s collection, Shoa’s work inserts itself alongside recognisable works, depicting family life, friendships and portraiture. At face value, it’s a clear statement that the subject of nearly all of the works on display at the Walker are not specific to any culture.
But there’s also a thread worth pulling, about how the works that each of Nahem Shoa’s paintings relate to have influenced him as an artist, whether its as a direct reference for the structure of a painting, or as a cue to how to approach certain subjects.
‘Giant Head of Gbenga’, the painting that gives the intervention its title, ‘Into The Light’, is part of a series of giant heads, designed to bring the sitter and portrait painter closer together. The light, caught on Gbenga’s head bounces back into the gallery space, not only bringing the sitter out of shadows, but distinctly into contact with the viewer too.
It’s personal, and the fact the painting is named for its sitter, sets it very much apart from the most significant work used as a counterpart in this intervention.
The painting sits next to Augustus John’s ‘Two Jamaican Girls’. The painting shows two girls, unnamed, both bored, both probably unaware of Augustus John’s reasons for being there. The painter was apparently in favour of abolition, but the result is a painting that shows two girls who were, functionally, being used as a tool, in a painting where no context is given to their background, story, or anything else.
This painting, with all the mystery that surrounds it, is the only portrait of Black people in the permanent display at Walker Art Gallery.
So Gbenga’s giant head is doing a massive amount of work. It doesn’t just highlight the need for more diverse representation in this collection, and on these walls. It offers the first, literally, encounter with a Black body. It means that when you walk into the Walker, you find a named, willing, sitter, being painted by a painter who cared about representing them. And you get there before you get to ‘Two Jamaican Girls’.
Through the rest of the gallery, there are depictions of Shoa’s friends and extended family, as well as professional sitters. They are placed alongside and in reference to paintings that share their themes, and in every case they bring the experience of seeing the historic paintings into the present.
There are objects and paintings that have remained in the same spot on the Walker’s walls since I was a child, trapsing round on school trips. So if, like me, you’re familiar with the Walker’s collection displays to the point of indifference, Nahem Shoa’s multiple interventions are a brilliant way to reignite a passion for the paintings you’ve started floating past between the entrance and the temporary exhibitions.
Into The Light: An Intervention by Nahem Shoa was on free display until 12th August 2024
Words, Kathryn Wainwright (Art In Liverpool)
Some examples of Shoa's painting on Art Uk website.
Head of Desirée 2000–2001Nahem Shoa (b.1968) Laing Art Gallery
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Nahem Shoa - artist - The Unselfish Selfie October 8 2022 - March 4 2023
Nahem Shoa explained his approach to the exhibition as follows:
“We live in an age where social media has taken over people’s everyday life. We ‘share’ our lives with ‘friends’, most of whom we have never met, knowing these ‘friends’ around the world only through their posts and carefully composed self-images.
The modern selfie is a form of group vanity that has never been seen on this scale in the history of the world.”
In contrast the artists in The Unselfish Selfie don’t use clichéd poses. They are caught in the process of self-examination, confronting their own frailties and their own mortality. Others use their own image to explore the big issues of today, such as identity, diversity and gender", Nahem Shoa
“We live in an age where social media has taken over people’s everyday life. We ‘share’ our lives with ‘friends’, most of whom we have never met, knowing these ‘friends’ around the world only through their posts and carefully composed self-images.
The modern selfie is a form of group vanity that has never been seen on this scale in the history of the world.”
In contrast the artists in The Unselfish Selfie don’t use clichéd poses. They are caught in the process of self-examination, confronting their own frailties and their own mortality. Others use their own image to explore the big issues of today, such as identity, diversity and gender", Nahem Shoa
FACE OF BRITAIN - NAHEM SHOA
Nahem Shoa was born in London in 1968. His parents are from, Scottish, Yemeni, Eritrean, and Russian backgrounds and he grew up in Notting Hill, London one of Britain’s most culturally diverse neighbourhoods. In his teens he worked as a graffiti artist before studying at Manchester College of Art, the Princes Drawing School and later with artist Robert Lenkiewicz. He has curated a number of exhibitions on the theme of race and multiculturalism and his work is held by collections including Southampton City Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, The Hatton, Newcastle and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter. The V&A has a drawing by Shoa.
Nahem Shoa: Face of Britain 2020
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FACE OF BRITAIN, curated by Nahem Shoa, is an exhibition of portraits by outstanding artists who have painted British individuals from the 17th century to the present day. At its heart is a selection of Shoa’s own striking oil paintings of black and mixed race sitters.
Face of Britain asks a question which is especially pertinent as world events force the widespread reassessment of our history and institutions: What does it mean to be British in 2020? At a time when many of the paintings in our national museums do not represent a non-white presence in Britain with evidence suggests stretches back to Roman times, this is a portrait of our country inviting us to consider our diversity. Nahem Shoa Face of Britain - Southampton City Art Gallery 25 September 2020 -20 February 2021 The exhibition will launch just ahead of Black History Month and run until February - October 2021. Shoa has chosen work by contemporary black artists like Desmond Haughton, Sonia Boyce and Chris Ofili to be displayed alongside historic portraits by Antony Van Dyck and John Singer Sargeant and paintings by seminal Modernist figures such as Gwen John, Walter Sickert and Frank Auerbach.
‘The portrait has always been political, originating with iconic depictions of God and used by Kings as a symbol of their divine right to rule over their subjects. I want my portraits to be great works of art but also to work as political propaganda for positive change’. |
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Nahem Shoa talks about life, art, nature, climate change, race and Black Lives matter during Covid-19 2020. His themes have always reflected current concerns. His paintings of his friends from BME backgrounds were ahead of their times. Racism then was so systemic that these paintings were not given their true significance. He is part of the Arborealists, artists who love trees.
Nahem Shoa's painting of Desiree is on display at The Laing, Newcastle,
 Nahem Shoa
Nahem Shoa’s artistic vision draws heavily on the current state of the world that capture the zeitgeist of this present moment in history,.climate change nature, trees, race, BLM, BME and BAME, 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. In these contemporary scenes
NAHEM SHOA PAINTER - ARTIST http://www.nahemshoa.co.uk Nahem 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 Doig, Richter, 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. Black Portraits-Nahem Shoa at RAMM http://www.youtube.com/nahemshoa Take a look at more images painted and drawn by 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. The more I look at trees I marvel at their ability to adapt and survive, They live so long and have been witness to so many human events that you truly feel they have a soul." Nahem Shoa 2018 (extract).
A Butterfly lands on Nahem Shoa's drawing, 2018
Nahem Shoa, Paintings
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/exh_gfx_en/ART40509.html
Kate Carson Art Crtic and Art Historian reviews Nahem Shoa's work at his solo show at Bury Museum & Art Gallery. See Nahem Shoa's imaginative paintings 2013/15 "Shoa seems to be a artist who has a craving for the strange and the extreme, which only goes to make these drawing more disturbing, beautiful and full of visionary character."  Giant Heads Many
Nahem Shoa shows his paintings on his Giant Head's site. http://nahemshoaarchive.weebly.com
Below are some of Nahem Shoa's collaged paintings. His numerous awards include the first prize from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Lord Leighton Prize and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award.
 Pieta: Nahem Shoa Drawing
Nahem Shoa has been fascinated by Monkeys and Primates all his life and his rotary pen drawings are testament to this.
Nahem Shoa makes these drawings from a combination of memory, art history and his own imagination. 
Furze is artist PETER DAVIS'S WEBSITE OF TRAVELLING SKETCHES "This site consists mostly of quick sketches I made while travelling. I find that trying to draw what I see engages me in the moment, while using a camera distances and excludes."
Inma Meruelo reads the book the wrote and illustrated for children during Covid-19 Pandemic 2020/21 to help them understand what is going on without fear. (C)
Once Upon a Time in Covid-19 Time. Inma Meruelo wrote and illustrated a book for children Once Upon a Time in Covid -19.
"I produced a video animation of Inma reading her marvellous book." Myrna Shoa |
A Childhood RememberedMyrna Shoa and her late sister Sandra's stories
Sandra and Myrna A Childhood
A CHILDHOOD REMEMBERED is a wonderful archive of two loving sisters,"In the last year of my sister Sandra's life we passionately gathered together our stories from our childhood for this website. We disagreed sometimes about what happened realising that we saw the world through our own eyes. This enlivened the recollections, made them richer. These stories are mainly for our families to read, to answer questions about their backgrounds, history and connection to the other cultures they have come from. With Sandra's passing I am the last of the Horowitchs. No one else is alive.Without this wonderful story gathering I would not have been able to write, illustrate and have published Strange Ways Stories about our shared upbringing. As children the only relatives we had were dad Joseph and mum Ina and our Uncle Morris and Aunty Rosie. The relatives on our mother Ina's side, the Hendry's as far as knew were dead. Sandra and I met Aunty Betty, our mother's sister several times in London and Uncle James our mother's brother a few times, in Scotland.
Sandra lives on in these stories, These stories may resonate with yours,". 
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MY SISTER SANDRA a great artist and jewellery maker died on November 18th 2007, See her wonderful ArtWork. My tribute to my sister. Images from my wonderful late sister Sandra Barnard. Wild Dance Images. Admire, her jewellery. A talented, skillfull woman and sister. The Fool 1970s London fashionThe Fool Ltd Myrna, Shoa, Ruti and Aury entrepreneurial women's fashion. Take a look at The Fool website
Donald Dede is a graphic designer - 2020 Art gallery website
www.donalddede.weebly.com Donald Dede's Art Photos of London and Beyond. http://www.users.waitrose.com/~indeezine/index.html
 Comfort and Desiree
Donald Dede, artist writes about his Six Weeks In Nigeria. He has created a website-blog filled with his photos and vivid stories of his emotional visit to his family.
http://6-weeks-in-nigeria.weebly.com/ https://12-weeksin-nigeria.weebly.com  Hazel Riley
Hazel Riley
I am a writer who draws her inspiration from many sources including nature, dance, mythology, popular culture, art and old movies. I have written two novels for teenagers Thanis and The Crying, both published by Oxford University Press. I have written and published resources for beginner adult readers with my friend and colleague Myrna Shoa.
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Gbenga Ilumoka is an artist, a painter in oils and acrylics. He is passionate about art and art history. "As a black artist I am always trying to make powerful paintings that provoke change in the art world. I want the black presence in my paintings to be reflected across Britain today".
Gbenga Ilumoka is a close friend of Nahem Shoa. |
Gbenga self portrait
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