Shem
Shem
Shem is a painter and narrator of modern life, a colourist, and a passionate Londoner.
If you are interested in Shem’s work please contact Trix Mendez at Outside the Zone Gallery (outsidethezone@gmail.com)
His paintings speak to us quietly, but urgently. His work is intensely personal and reflective, but his subject-matter concerns the rueful task we all face, of celebrating the things that have made us strong and battling the things that have set us back.
In Shem’s paintings, the conclusion is sometimes as clear as a traffic signal; more often it hovers in the dream states between sleep and consciousness. He has no formal art training. But his range of colours, and the handwritten statements, poetry and symbols he deploys, give him a rich visual and emotional vocabulary.
It would be easy to reach for obvious categorisations when considering Shem’s work. But the careful viewer might hesitate before doing so. Shem’s wide and apparently chaotic range of media reveals a restless approach to his surroundings, his city, and our troubled times. there is an immediacy in Shem’s use of found or reclaimed surfaces, acrylic paint, marker pen, crayon and collage. There is also a value tenderly placed on the things and the people that might find themselves ignored or discarded. There is certainly anger and indignation too. But there is delight as well, and optimism, and these Shem exuberantly shares with us.
Biography
Shem was born in Tottenham, north London. His mother’s heritage includes ancestry from Maroon communities of rebel slaves and runaways who lived in the mountainous interior of Jamaica.
Shem performs with Cut With, an alternative hip hop group.
Shem started painting in 2015. He successfully staged his first shows in 2018 and 2019 in disused premises where he lived as a property guardian, including a fish and chip shop in Clapham and a bookmakers in Streathem.
In June 2020 Shem exhibited “We are in the Future”, a painted billboard in Old Street, as part of a programme of installations curated by Trix Mendez and Outside the Zone. His work is in numerous private collections.
He now lives and works in Dalston.
Text by Sir Richard Heaton
