This month, Tate Britain will unveil a new series of delicate and intimate paintings and drawings from Kenyan-born, London-based artist Zeinab Saleh. Suggesting both fleeting movement and suspended time, these works draw on everyday experiences, personal encounters and the dreamlike quality of memory. This is the latest in Tate Britain’s ongoing Art Now series of free exhibitions showcasing emerging talent and highlighting the latest developments in contemporary British art.
Saleh’s new body of work for Tate Britain has been made using acrylic paint, charcoal and soft pastels. Through her materials and colour palette, the viewer is invited into a place of calm contemplation. Her paintings and drawings are ambiguous in subject and setting. Layers of time and meaning are projected onto the works through recurring patterns and silhouettes, alluding to narratives that are rarely fully revealed.
Zeinab Saleh is a multidisciplinary artist whose unique visual language sees the use of acrylic, charcoal and chalk swept across the canvas, revealing depths of texture. Shade and colour are presented in tender, pale hues. Within her work, she aims to provide ‘spaces for the viewer’s imagination to continue the painting’, encouraging prolonged and active looking. These light, delicate spaces are occupied by forms which appear to float, only becoming temporarily grounded as the viewer’s gaze is drawn to heavier areas of acrylic paint. Saleh describes this effect as a ‘temporal shift’ between movement and stillness. The recurring motifs which populate her works act similarly, slipping between representation and abstraction. The power of these ethereal paintings and drawings is held in their ability to both invite and escape immediate interpretation.
Since the 1990s, Tate Britain’s Art Now exhibitions have recognised talent at its outset and have provided a launching platform for artists who have gone on to become established figures on the international art scene. Recent exhibitions in the series have showcased the work of artists including Rhea Dillon, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Shawanda Corbett and Danielle Dean.
Curated by Amy Emmerson Martin, Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art and Nathan Ladd, Curator, Contemporary British Art.
Art Now: Zeinab Saleh, 19th January – 23rd June 2024, Tate Britain
About the artist
Zeinab Saleh (b.1996, Kenya) lives and works in London. She was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, Softest place (on earth), at Camden Art Centre in 2021, and her work has been included in group exhibitions both in the UK and internationally, including at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, USA in 2023 and at the UCL Art Museum, London in 2018. She received her BFA from Slade School of Fine Art in 2019.
