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Escape Into Art
Powder Hues in Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s Paintings"There is something vital about not fully knowing," says Pippa.
"Confusion, doubt and contradiction sit inside the work. That feels true to how it is to be alive."
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In a world that feels increasingly harsh and uncertain, there's something radical about softness.
A London-based artist of British and Iraqi heritage and a graduate of the Royal College of Art, Pippa El-Kadhi Brown paints in a state of radical softness. Her canvases sit in the suspended interval between recognition and dissolution; forms hover at the edge of legibility, colour contributes to charged atmosphere. Pastel fields swell and recede across the surface, punctured by currents that pull the eye through the painting in slow, meandering movements.
Hues vibrating against one another become forms that appear briefly alive before dissolving back into the field. Fragments of the natural world, interior space and bodily sensation drift through her compositions. Pippa's paintings appear to breathe, their surfaces thick with hesitation, revision and intuitive adjustment.
On view at our group exhibition, Fertile Dreams, Pippa's work offers up a meditation on the generative potential of the in-between state. Here she gives us a glimpse into the impulses behind her luminous worlds, and on the way dreaming, uncertainty and sensation feed the evolving language of her painting.
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Pippa El-Kadhi Brown, Magnets to Dreams, 2024, Oil on canvas, 98 x 138.5 cm -
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On Fertile Dreams
"I connect to the notion in many ways. My dreamy environments dance between form, psyche, and environment; a chimeric entity made of all."
"I return to the idea of fertility; productive, plentiful, inherently feminine. The dreamscapes I paint resemble chambers of the mind that continue to expand. They hold shifting emotional states: hopefulness, anxiety, whimsy, naïveté, uncertainty. Landscapes rise and fall. Waters hover and crash. Air erupts and settles again. The terrain is rough and wild, bruised and untamed, difficult to navigate yet strangely beautiful; lush, dense, tangled and alive.Dreams are a sequence of thoughts, images and sensations moving through the unconscious. I am interested in how place lives within us and how we respond to it internally; becoming the space, merging it with other places, recalling fragments of landscapes that blur, dissolve and evolve.Dreams, then, become fertile ground for expanding these inner moments. The mind functions almost as a diary, transferring sensation onto the canvas. These dreamscapes often feel fantastical and celebratory, perhaps offering a temporary refuge from the harsher realities of the present.The worlds in my paintings hold multiple moments simultaneously. They expand and multiply, magnifying sensation and memory. Within this growth, they invite viewers to look inward." -
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown
Anther and Stigma, 2025Oil on canvas
120 x 180 cm
47 1/4 x 70 7/8 in -
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown, Will-o-the Wisp, 2025, Oil and ink on canvas, 24 x 18 x 2 cm
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