Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood exhibition
Hayward Gallery touring show, featuring works by over 60 artists including Jai Chuhan, Tracey Emin, Celia Paul, Paula Rego. Curated by Hettie Judah.
Arnolfini, Bristol: Mar – Jun 2024
Midlands Art Centre (MAC), Birmingham: 22 Jun – 29 Sep 2024
Millennium Gallery, Sheffield: 24 Oct 2024 – 19 Jan 2025
Dundee Contemporary Arts: 19 Apr – 13 Jul 2025
Hayward Touring Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood exhibition, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, 2024
Jai Chuhan 'Self Portrait', 1995, oil on canvas, 210 x 150 cm.
Arts Council Collection.
David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Grant
Annely Juda gallery, London 10–20 Sep 2024.
Seven artists were nominated by Peter Doig, curator of the show.
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Jai Chuhan 'Self-Portrait – Gallery', 2024,
oil on canvas, 75 x 90 cm
Jai Chuhan solo exhibition, Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, France,
27 April – 3 June 2024.
Jai Chuhan solo exhibition, Paris Internationale art fair,
October 2023, with Champ Lacombe gallery.
Small Paintings solo exhibition, Qrystal Partners, London.
4 May – 15 June 2023. Curated by Donald Ryan.
QRYSTAL PARTNERS
7 NEWINGTON CAUSEWAY, LONDON, SE1 6ED
Jai Chuhan
Small Paintings
4 May through 15 June 2023
Opening Reception: 4 May 2023, 6-8PM
Qrystal Partners presents Small Paintings an exhibition by the Manchester, United Kingdom based artist Jai Chuhan. This inaugural project at 7 Newington Causeway in London has been organized by Donald Ryan and Supriya Lele.
The works on view in Small Paintings express the artist’s insistence on the motif as a catalyst for painterly invention. Chuhan has described her painting practice to be one that is prompted by her questions about how to create a visual equivalence to her feelings. By engaging a limited formal vocabulary based on figure, interior, and landscape, Chuhan, explores the broad expressive potential of representational imagery. A melancholic, instinctive sense beckons in each of the canvases as the painter becomes the painting with mind and body. Though these works are professedly portraits, these paintings test the limits of representational legibility and create a phycological spatial dynamic. Chuhan was born in India and emigrated to London with her family in the late 1960s. She attended and graduated from the Slade School of Art at University College London in the 1970s. It is during this time that she encountered the paintings of Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and many others. Chuhan, who is an astute art historian, directly engages with the histories of painting without a sense of cynicism. Rather, she confidently stakes her claim on the medium and brings her vital perspective to the table. A perspective that refuses bravado and probes ideas of empathy, or lack thereof. Making a proposal for how paint and colour can be employed to access notions of intimacy in order to feel connected with art.
An index of being alive exhibition, Park View / Paul Soto,
Los Angeles, USA. 10 December 2022 – 21 January 2023.
PARK VIEW / PAUL SOTO are pleased to announce An index of being alive, a group exhibition comprised of new works made by an international and intergenerational set of artists: Loay Al Derazi, Jai Chuhan, Andrew J. Greene, Megan Plunkett, Reina Sugihara, and Julia Yerger. The exhibition will open at our gallery’s Los Angeles location on Saturday, December 10, 2022, with a public reception for the artists from 5 to 7pm, and it will run through the winter until Saturday January 21, 2023.
An index of being alive highlights works that appear to possess ordinary, indexical qualities of being alive, as any human being would who – from moment to moment – possesses a body, moves through space, produces, consumes, speaks, and inhabits. In the case of these particular works, these qualities are transformed beyond rote expectation, displaying a vitality that transcends any static, ascribed meanings or data points. Their cups runneth over, so to speak, with material and visual elements that compress and abstract within their medium, releasing floods of feeling and emotion. The exhibition as a whole thus accounts for vulnerability, a felt sense of accumulated time, and other immeasurable human qualities.
Pink Room 2022
oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm
Night I 2022
oil on canvas 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Refuge solo exhibition, Gallery Oldham, Asia Triennial Manchester 2018.
Jai Chuhan presented paintings that often show an isolated figure seemingly confined within a room-like space, an arena for exploring themes such as love, suggesting psychological tensions in symbioses of male and female, home and ‘unhome’. The images reflect transcultural aesthetic influences inspired by her position as an Indian-born British artist.
Remodel Painting Studio solo exhibition at HOME,
Asia Trieinnal, Manchester, 2018.
Sometimes paintings by Jai Chuhan are shown within installations of objects and involve dance. For Asia Triennial Manchester 2018 in her Remodel: Painting Studio solo exhibition in the main gallery at HOME, she commenced eight large paintings alongside a display of completed paintings and objects including hanging sari textiles, with visitors able to paint and join events with life models and dancers. Music and colour created an immersive space, for interactions between objects, people and a variety of art practices – in an exhibition that was a live art studio for Jai chuhan and for also visitors who could make paintings in the gallery. The curator Adam Carr found links with the exhibition curated by Bart De Baere in 1994 at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent titled This is the show and the show is of many things.
Adam Carr comments that Jai Chuhan’s show ‘…seemed to posit constant questions of control and loss of control, and issues of roles of artist, participant, audience and spectator, and they seemed to interchange, conflate and be subject to renewal throughout’.
Adam Carr, Jai Chuhan: This is the show and the show is Remodeled in Jai Chuhan: Refuge, Gulab Publications, distributed by Cornerhouse Publications, 2020.
Image: Mario Popham
