British artist of Iraqi heritage, Pippa El-Kadhi Brown (b. 1996) graduated from Royal College of Art in 2022, where she studied MA Painting under The Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. She studied BA Painting at The University of Brighton, School of Art, where she graduated in 2018.
Her earlier paintings are inhabited with curious household spirits; anthropomorphic figures that brush through space and dissolve into furniture. Her work is influenced by vast varying themes such as phenomenology, abjection, and consciousness, combined with the idea of compressed realities found in kitsch 1950’s cartoon backdrops. Her paintings of inner worlds are not physical but emotional, manifested through depth and sensation, reflected in us all as domesticated beings.
The edges of Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s canvases have always delineated sites as much as situations. Increasingly, in her most recent work those scenes are shifting from uncanny domestic tableaux to hazier splicings; dreamscapes, emotional excavations. And while the spectral forms and presences that inhabited her earlier work have become less explicit in her latest series, made during recent stays in Nairobi, Kenya — a distinct sense of haunting remains.
Her work evokes the experience of waking from a dream, and feeling its vivid details trickle away in real time; signs with no signifiers, colours pulsing and fading at once. Combining vastness and minutiae, El-Kadhi Brown’s canvases contain more sights and sites than they can hold; comfortable with that inherent paradox, they invite their viewer to step off a somnambulant, stomach-lurching ledge: the kind that meets you on the brink of sleep.
Solo Exhibitions:
Stranger Skies, Holden Gallery, Manchester (2025), Haunt, Ed Cross Gallery, London (2024), Walls Who Whisper, Lychee One, London (2023), Vista, Lamb Gallery, London (2023) Where the Dust Settles, CBU Gallery, Taipei (2022), Around You, Within You, Or Nowhere at All, Ashurst, London, (2020), House Plants, Creekside Projects, London (2019)
Awards include: Freelands Foundation Fellowship Award (2024), The Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award, Royal College of Art (2024), Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize (2020), Art Pegazs Taste of Life Award (2019)
Her work is in private collections internationally including the UK, USA, Korea, UAE and Nigeria