Mukesh Shah

Mukesh Shah's practice is observing, intuitive and reductive - whether using text to explore the zeitgeist or creating tactile abstract compositions that may be viewed as inner landscapes.

Kind of Blue explores the uneven line as a fundamental building block of human expression. It is how we write and draw, depict the rhythmic beating of a heart or the flight of a bee going about its business. There are no straight lines in nature, even a beam of light must follow the curvature of space-time. The edges of any line fragment as you zoom in, perhaps signifying the blurred separation between order and chaos, reality and illusion, figuration and abstraction, sacred and profane, between life and the absence of life. 

The works in this open-ended series use the materiality of organic fibre - surgical cotton gauze, cardboard and rice paper, for instance - in a process of imperfect mark-making to create reductive compositions. Kind of Blue  is the title of the singular jazz album recorded by Miles Davis in 1959.

Mukesh Shah (b 1959, British Indian) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Dubai. He was born in Aden (Yemen) when it was a British Colony. His family emigrated to Bombay in 1967, as the British left and a Marxist paramilitary group formed the new People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. After school in Bombay until 1975 he was educated in the UK and lived in London till 2013. He has an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

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