Pippa El-Khadi Brown
"I am fascinated by the way we, as humans, live in and fill space(s), both physical and psychological, space has the capacity, through distortion, to become intellective; as the viewer steps into my paintings, the paint reaches back out to the viewer, fusing and separating in tandem." - Pippa El-Khadi Brown
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown explores the enigmatic dialogue between domestic space, consciousness, and the human psyche. Working primarily in oil paint, she uses gesture and materiality to explore how we interact with space, both physically and emotionally. Challenging the notion of ‘our natural habitat’, in her work the domestic home is perceived as a conscious space, which as human beings we have adapted to both merge with and coexist beside.
In her works, fleshy creatures smear across the canvas, with their surroundings appearing as extensions of themselves. Enclosing a hive of information, the domestic environments Pippa creates are suggestive of the occupier; filled with objects that allude to a past, present and future, exposing certain elements, but more importantly, concealing others.
For Pippa, the domestic home exists as a tangible demonstration of the self and/or the non-self, the ego and the superego; the abject. Unaware of the outside world, the figures she depicts unknowingly become part of the furniture. Bodily presence/absence and its relationship to consciousness, has led Pippa to explore philosophical movements such as phenomenology, existentialism and themes such as alienation. Pippa's painted spaces are not physical, but emotional, manifested through depth and sensation, reflected in humans as domesticated beings.
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown (b.1996) is a London based artist, she graduated BA: Painting at the University of Brighton in 2018, after which she completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2022.
Recent selected solo exhibitions include: Walls Who Whisper (Lychee One, London, 2023), Where the Dust Settles (CBU Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2022), Around You, Within You, or Nowhere at All (Ashurst, London, 2020) and House Plants (Creekside Projects, London, 2019).
Recent group exhibitions include: Culture EXPO (Culture Centre, Ningbo, China, 2022), Beijing Contemporary Art EXPO (Beijing, China, 2022), The Infinite Game: Hide and Seek (WAS Art Centre, Ningbo, China, 2022), A Feast for the Eyes (StART Art Fair, Galleria Foret, Seoul, Korea, 2022), Fancy a Bite? (STUDIO WEST, London, 2022), One Art Taipei (The Sherwood Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan, 2022), Garden of the New Deity (Lí Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2022), Art Taipei (Taipei World Trade Center, Taipei, Taiwan, 2021), Star Start 2 (Rear Window Gallery, Hangzhou, China, 2021), The Running Water Takes Me to a Farther Lake (Meisyakan, Ningbo, China, 2021) and Brighten up the Night (Yuan Museum, Hangzhou, China, 2021).
She received The Ali H. Alazzi Scholarship Award (2020), The Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize (2020), The Art Pegazs Taste of Life Award (2019) and The Creekside Graduate Studio Award (2019). She was a finalist for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2023) as well as The Chadwell Award (2022) and the Global Design Graduate Award (2022). She has also taken part in residencies internationally including The Organhaus Residency (2019), Chongqing, China, and the Creekside Graduate Residency (2019), London, UK.
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The Angel in the House
Group Exhibition 22 June - 20 July 2023Taking John Everett Millais' intricate painting The Bridesmaid (1851) as its starting point, the exhibition seeks to ignite a transhistorical discussion centring around notions of femininity in the context of...Read more -
Fancy a Bite?
Group Exhibition 15 June - 6 July 2022In FANCY A BITE? themes emerge surrounding our complex relationships to food, domesticity, nostalgia, and cultural heritage. Through installation, ceramic sculpture and painting, the exhibition encourages the viewer to delve...Read more
