A Flame is a Petal

A Flame is a Petal is Mohammed Z. Rahman’s second solo exhibition at Phillida Reid, including new large and small scale paintings, along with new sculptural installation. The exhibition is a meditation on the love and community at stake in an early apocalyptic context marked by social polarisation and ecological destruction. Utilising the symbolism and chromatics of fire and flowers, Rahman explores themes of revolutionary love through memories, dreams, objects and tributes to community. The title is inspired by the yogic practice of trataka meditation which involves watching a candle flame to focus the mind, which Rahman interprets as seeing...

Mohammed Z. Rahman, pictured with Awake, Art Basel Hong Kong, Phillida Reid, 2024. Image by Sebastiano Pellion, courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London.

Mohammed Z. Rahman is a British-Bengali artist based in London. With a background in social anthropology, Rahman approaches his practice as both an intimate and political force. Interweaving personal, social and folk histories of migration, labour, queerness, family and class, his paintings disturb conventions of domestic ...

Mohammed Z. Rahman is a British-Bengali artist based in London. With a background in social anthropology, Rahman approaches his practice as both an intimate and political force. Interweaving personal, social and folk histories of migration, labour, queerness, family and class, his paintings disturb conventions of domestic space and custom in favour of dream logic and moments of magical realism, excavating stories of overlooked figures and everyday resistance. Allegorical and concrete, his domestic scenes employ the vernacular of surrealism and social realism – art movements which, Rahman points out, flourish during times of social unrest: “the former, in that it allows one to dream beyond current conditions and process the unconscious, and the latter, to give voice to the everyday lived experience of the working and non-ruling classes, acting against hegemony.”

Recent solo exhibitions include Awake, Art Basel Hong Kong, with Phillida Reid, March 2024. Group exhibitions include Love Will Come Back: Ann Craven with Robert Mapplethorpe and Mohammed Z. Rahman, Phillida Reid, London (2024); On Feeling – an exhibition about emotion and subjectivity, curated by Peter Davies, The Approach, London (2024); Atavism for the Future, Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, USA (2023). Rahman’s work was included in 2022’s Brent Biennial, In the House of my Love, curated by Eliel Jones. His first solo exhibition at Phillida Reid, City of Burrows, opened in February 2023.

“Mohammed offers an antidote to political projects that erase lives deemed inconvenient, or as efforts of producing knowledge that, like Mohammed himself found, at times enforce a dangerous method of capture rather than embracing and foregrounding the strangeness that is at stake. His deep and personal understanding of colours and form, coupled with a dedication to a new form of surreal, social-realist aesthetic, results in works that ask of us more than just looking at a painting. Mohammed draws us in with an offering, and then extends an open invitation for solidarity.” – Eliel Jones, 2023