Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1963 Jhelum, Pakistan

Year of Migration to the UK: 1970

Biography

Sculptor and painter Nasser Azam was born in Jhelum, Pakistan in 1963. He began painting on the walls of his parents’ house in Jhelum (‘Azam – Portrait of an Artist’, YouTube, 2009). He moved to London with his parents in 1970 when he was seven years old, growing up in the London borough of Newham and attending Hartley Primary and Langdon Secondary schools. Unaware that he had studied A Level Art until the course had finished, Azam’s parents were not supportive of his artistic education and aspirations. Due to family pressure, Azam had no formal training in art and he instead studied Business at the University of Birmingham. He subsequently had a successful career in the financial sector for 23 years, maintaining his artistic practice in his spare time in a make-shift studio in Birmingham. In an interview with the BBC in 1983, Azam sympathised with his parents' attitude, stating that it was understandable in the context of migrants who wanted their child to succeed academically and pursue a ‘secure career’ in a new country (BBC, 1983). His early works from this period depicted family life, and self-consciously leaned towards the religious rather than the political, showing ‘remarkable psychological insight’, while at the same time experimenting with different painting styles from symbolist to abstract imagery (Stonard, 2009).

After an extended period of living and travelling in Japan, Europe and America, Azam became Artist-in-Residence at County Hall Gallery, London between 2007 and 2010. Working from his north London studio, he mounted a series of exhibitions of early and recent work at the gallery, including the critically acclaimed Anatomica in April 2008. In February of that year, Azam’s monumental bronze, The Dance, was unveiled on London’s South Bank, opposite the Houses of Parliament. The flowing, dynamic, abstracted forms were reminiscent of Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (Stonard, 2009). Simultaneously, Azam began to experiment with painting as a performance in extreme conditions. In July 2008 he completed two triptychs as an homage to Francis Bacon while suspended in zero gravity in a parabolic aircraft above Moscow, Russia (Usborne, 2009). The works were shown in Life in Space at County Hall Gallery in 2009. A year later, he took to the freezing ice deserts of Antarctica, where he completed 13 large paintings. His Antarctica series was displayed in the Tokyo Metro, Japan and London Underground in 2011.

Gaining even more success as a public sculptor and painter, a 12-metre high bronze sculpture, Athena, was unveiled at London City Airport in July 2012. Located in the same borough in which he had grown up, Azam commented that he had ‘wanted to give something back to the community there’ (ArtDaily, 2012). This was followed by a six-metre tall bronze sculpture, Evolutionary Loop 517, unveiled outside the new Sir Duncan Rice Library at University of Aberdeen in May 2013. Two years later Azam’s commissioned portrait painting of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist , Nobel prizewinner and refugee, was unveiled at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. The large, three-metre-high painting intended to ‘reflect the huge impact’ Yousafzai had on the world, while the ‘modest background, featuring a plump sofa, also hints at a sense of homeliness and domesticity’, perhaps a commentary on Yousafzai’s new home in Birmingham (Morris, 2015). Greatly admired by Yousafzai, the portrait is now displayed permanently at the University of Birmingham. In 2019, London’s prestigious Saatchi Gallery hosted Nasser Azam: Saiful Malook, his largest and most comprehensive solo exhibition. The series of paintings in the exhibition were inspired by the artist’s journey to Lake Saiful Malook near the mountains of Kashmir.

Nasser Azam continues to lives and work in London. His work is held in the UK public domain at the University of Aberdeen.

Related books

John-Paul Stonard, Azam: A Short History of Sensation (London: Airside Publications, 2008)
'Artistic Gravitas', Physics World, Vol. 21, No. 8, August 2008, p. 3

Related organisations

County Hall Gallery (Artist in Residence)

Selected exhibitions

Nasser Azam: Saiful Malook, Saatchi Gallery, London (2019)
Timelessness, Rose & King Galleries, London (2016)
Bondage, Le Chiffre, London (2016)
Official Portrait Commission of Malala Yousafzai, unveiled at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, Birmingham (2015)
Art Below, The Muse Gallery, London (2015)
Art of Futebol, Selfridges, London (2014)
Ten Portraits of Margaret Thatcher, Gallery Different, London (2013)
Antarctica, Tokyo Metro, Japan, and London Underground, London (2011)
The Big Fake, Camden Arts Centre, London (2010)
Artist-in-Residence, County Hall Gallery, London (2007-2010)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Nasser Azam]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Nasser Azam artist