Freshers Inaugrual Show
by Sabrina Shah
Coming Soon
The exhibition brings together 14 works that unfold as fragments of a world both personal and imagined. Some works capture intimate conversations between characters within Shah’s invented universe; others depict figures gathered around a table, moments of communion that expand into shared narratives and “bitesize stories.” Together, these scenes construct a space that hovers between memory, reality and imagination.
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described transitional space as an “in-between” zone where imagination and reality overlap. It is a place where new possibilities can be explored, where unspoken feelings and unfinished stories take shape through play and creativity. For Shah, the studio becomes just such a space: a sanctuary in which experience and imagination intertwine, allowing fractured experiences to be reassembled on canvas and transformed into scenes that hold connection and resilience.
Her paintings capture bitesize stories that are being shared between friends and family, projecting onto canvas the dinners she longed for as much as those she remembers. The fractured compositions and luminous colours become vessels for reassembling memory, turning solitary meals into scenes of connection. In doing so, Shah’s works illuminate the hidden narratives around the table, offering both a reflection on exclusion and inclusion, judgement and redemption.
Biography
Sabrina Shah (b. 1986) is a London-based artist. Sabrina’s work explores how consumption can exhibit a duality of threat and safety, and what it means to be fighting inside and outside the group. Using cartoon-like characters she reveals their alternate natures, rewriting their fears and burdens.
She earned her MA in Fine Art Painting from the Royal College of Art, after studying at the University of Brighton and the Royal Drawing School. She is currently exhibiting in the John Moores Painting Prize 2025, awarded the inaugural Castlegate Prize in 2020. and the Leverhulme Scholarship in 2023.
Her first solo exhibition was at Indigo+madder, London (Talk to Me, 2023). She has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show (2024), HSBC Global HQ (2024), Two Temple Place & Thorp Stavri (2023) and Eve Liebe Gallery (‘Summer Show,’ 2022).