MOHAMMED Z. RAHMAN

Early Years

Mohammed Z Rahman (b 1997, London) has written about their path to becoming an artist. They remember visiting London’s free galleries with their sisters and seeing Van Gogh’s Two Crabs (1889) at the National Gallery—“Van Gogh’s vivid impasto brushwork and ingenuous use of colour told me a secret in a language I hadn’t known I understood,” they wrote. They also discuss seeing their paternal grandfather’s corpse in hospital and wanting to paint the unexpected posthumous colours of his skin. Working in their uncle’s Essex curry house in 2017 while a student (“fulfilling a Bengali working-class rite of passage”), Rahman experienced the often explicit racism of the customers alongside the stories told by the older generation (as well as being aware of their own sexual identity). They realised that “painting was the best language to journal the experience”.

A self-taught painter, Rahman studied social anthropology at SOAS University of London, and their ethnographic research experience informs their artistic practice.

Mohammed Z Rahmann: Artworks

Mohammed Z Rahman’s artistic practice uses colour and symbolism—they describe it as a “carnivalesque and grave palette”—to weave stories of personal and shared emotion surrounding social mobility, human rights and community. They say that their paintings “disturb conventions of domestic space and custom in favour of dream logic and moments of magical realism”.

They painted the triptych Cook, Serve, Become a Man in 2018 following their stint in their uncle’s restaurant. The three paintings depict an uncle’s hairy paunch, the flash jewellery sometimes worn by men of their uncle’s generation, and finally a knife slicing up the karela (gourd), the phallic symbolism of which is undeniable.

At Home (2025) is a permanent mural on the side of a block of flats in Hoxton, east London, featuring six vignettes in Rahman’s colourful, community-centric style, depicting family activities from eating together to playing music. Each space illustrates everyday life in a diverse London borough, yet enhances each scene with a dreamlike quality.

For In Minor Keys at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Rahman constructed Rolling Heart, bringing together selected sculptures and paintings in a wooden structure, including 2024’s Lovers’ Vigil, 64 matchbox paintings depicting objects typically associated with remembrance yet also acknowledging sexual freedom: candles, white flowers, pink fluffy handcuffs. Also featured were Memento Vivere (2024), a crate painted to look like condom packaging but memorialising social groups stepping up during the AIDS epidemic, and _Emergency Then (2024), a pair of paintings concerning fires, one seen by Rahman as a child as he was evacuated from his street, and another inspired by the Mostar unrest in 2014.

Mohammed Z Rahman: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2026)
• Hearthside, Oitij-jo Programme, Whitechapel Gallery, London and Phillida Reid, Art Basel Miami Beach (2025)
• Remember to Live, Peer, London (2024)
• A Flame is a Petal, Phillida Reid, London (2024)
• City of Burrows, Phillida Reid, London (2023)

Select Group Exhibitions

• In Minor Keys, 61st Venice Biennale (2026)
• Love Will Come Back: Ann Craven with Robert Mapplethorpe and Mohammed Z Rahman, Phillida Reid, London (2024)
• Bidrohi, Old Spitalfields Market, London (2024)
• On Feeling, The Approach, London (2024)
• Come Closer, Indigo + Madder, London (2023)
• Atavism for the Future, Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2023)
• Department of Unruly Histories, Cubitt, London (2023)

Further Reading

• Mohammed Z Rahman’s Instagram
• Artist profile page at Phillida Reid
• Mohammed Z Rahman’s official website

Mohammed Z. Rahman FAQs

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