Born in Wales, with a Yemeni and Bangladeshi heritage, Karimah Hassan understood that each community has its own lively colours and eccentricities to delve into. As an artist, Karimah gripped the vision of “taking stories full circle, from the canvas to the streets” with the mission of merging boundaries between worlds. She has recently been featured in iD magazine and will receive a solo show at Coal Drops Yard this spring.
The practice of merging boundaries requires bending and broadening them, which is quite apparent in Karimah’s artistic career practices. Karimah is originally trained as an architect, having studied this and graduated from Royal College of Arts London in 2016. After graduating she left for New York to begin her art career that centers around the importance of community inclusions.
SOLD
59.4 x 42 cm
Acrylic on Fine Art Paper
SOLD
59.4 x 42 cm
Acrylic on Fine Art Paper
Karimah is a self-taught painter with a signature bold and expressive aesthetics on her pieces. Adding contemporary touches to Fauvism, she often favours strong and captivating colour combinations on her pieces to paint the nuance of lively spontaneity and intensity. Karimah’s medium for her arts varies vastly, ranging from paper, canvas, to walls -- highlighting her versatility as a painter as she’s able to switch between fine artistry, to street and community arts. Within her paintings fluid and harsh strokes are combined seamlessly and harmonically, reflecting the multi-layered expression of humanness that is often sensed inside communities, and how all the differences made up a whole.
Beyond her medium, Karimah often elevates the sense of togetherness by combining her artistic stylings with community-centric presentations of her arts, done across London and New York. This renders exhibitions of her artworks to complement or be complementary to other modes of art. This practice is rooted in implementing the ‘socially-engaged arts’ genre, which originated in the public art movements in the 1990s. This genre enables the audience to become active participants or to get engulfed within the arts happening around them, forming and fostering more humane connections between the audience, the artist, and the arts. Previous exhibits of Karimah’s arts were done in combination with poetry readings, live jazz, open mic sessions, and live paintings amongst other communal activities, that often let others into her creative processes - truly the marking of her strong sense and vision of community building.
Karimah’s art is also often inspired by, and paired with the growth of culture or any shared sentiments within the communities that inspired her, as exemplified by her latest strings of works on ‘The Strangers Yearbook’ project. Through this project, Karimah displayed an acute sense of awareness about human-centric challenges and occurrences during the time of the pandemic, especially during the first UK lockdown.
As a community-rooted artist, the lack of communal activities brings about the pang of isolation and disconnectivity. Nevertheless, Karimah found a way to reconnect the community by documenting people’s feelings in these uncertain times. In ‘The Strangers Yearbook’, which lives on as an ongoing Instagram gallery of paintings, Karimah asked people to send a selfie and a description in response for her to paint into artworks and display them on the digital gallery. This particular art project transcends feelings beyond the paper and has enabled Karimah to build a 300+ strong community in a trying time like the pandemic.
SOLD
59.4 x 42 cm
Acrylic on Fine Art Paper
SOLD
59.4 x 42 cm
Acrylic on Fine Art Paper
Strong awareness and a sense of selflessness are often the marks of Karimah’s distinctive character, highly present in her artistic career; be it in her stylistic choices of colours and strokes, overall themes of her arts, as well as her presentations of them; and most importantly in Karimah’s frequent engagements with the general and artist communities around her. That particular distinctive style made Karimah the Artist in Residence at Sarabande Foundation London, and her other clients include The Barbican, Ted Baker, Arts Council England, The Highline New York, Toronto Arts Council, and Crxss Platfxrms.
Actualising boundaries merging with her practices, Karimah’s art moves between spaces and feelings, offering the audience a safe space for connectivity through each art, as “the journey of each piece and the audience it connects to is as fascinating as the art itself."
SOLD
59.4 x 42 cm
Acrylic on Fine Art Paper
Follow Karimah on her instagram and website.
Artwork photographs courtesy of Karimah Hassan and Sarabande Foundation. Portraits taken by Alina zum Hebel (website/ instagram). Photography courtesy of where’s the frame? and Alina zum Hebel.
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