Nahem Shoa’s London homecoming
13 min read
William Hine was surprised he’d never heard of London artist Nahem Shoa when he first came across his work in Manchester. A year later, he’s hosting the artist’s biggest London show in 20 years

Nahem Shoa, Desmond Haughton, 1991, oil on board. © the artist. Image credit: Manchester Art Gallery
January 2025
I’m looking through my phone calendar to pinpoint the precise day last summer that I first met Nahem Shoa. I’m flicking through the weekly view for August as I know it was that month. The art world was firmly in its off-season but I was all over the place, getting ready to open my own gallery in Camberwell about eight weeks later. The calendar is a jumble of appointments and notes-to-self: ‘2 pm insurance call’; ‘Order remaining lights’; ‘Collect keys (Shad Thames office)’ ‘Call Notary in Forest Hill’’; ‘Call plasterer.’
Found it. 14th August 2024, 11 am. ‘Visit Nahem.’ Though this is when we met, my relationship with his work began months earlier.

Nahem Shoa, View from Hulme Flat, 1990, oil on board. © the artist. Image credit: Manchester Art Gallery
March 2024
I’m at Manchester Art Gallery when I come across Nahem’s work. The museum has two paintings in its collection from his student days in the city: a small, gritty cityscape of a now-demolished council estate in Hulme and a portrait of his childhood friend, Desmond, set against a crimson backdrop, poster peeling off the wall in their student house, with a shadow over his left shoulder looking quite ominous. This guy could clearly paint, I think, and at this time he was all of 22 years old. I make a note to Google him later, a frequent habit of mine whenever I see something I like in a museum’s collection by an artist I’ve not heard of. When I do, I notice that he’d also got a solo on view at The Walker in Liverpool running into late summer. I’m curious.

Nahem Shoa, Back of Gbenga Ilumoka’s Head, 2003, oil on canvas. © the artist. Image credit: Walker Art Gallery
July 2024
I return home to Manchester to visit family and decide to go over to Liverpool to see Nahem’s show. I read online that they’ve just acquired a painting of his, the one that they’re using for the poster and website, Back of Gbenga Ilumoka’s Head. It’s an iconic looking image; something about it reminds me of a photo Wolfgang Tillmans might have taken. Seeing the caption in the museum I’m surprised to learn it was painted in 2003. It seems so current.
His paintings are hung as an ‘intervention’ throughout The Walker’s permanent collection, in stark contrast with much of the Victorian art acquired through the patronage of the city’s elite, whose wealth accumulated from links to slavery and empire. There’s a group portrait of some twenty-somethings hanging out in a Notting Hill flat. It looks a little old-fashioned but at the same time like it could have been painted yesterday. I look down and realise my own trainers are basically the same as those of the sitters. In one of the final rooms I saw another painting of Gbenga hanging next to a 1966 David Hockney, and opposite a huge Peter Doig painting from 1993. Nahem’s work looks right at home to me. How have I not heard of this artist?
Back in London I find his email address online. I learn he’s in his late 50s now and seems to live in London but spends time painting in Spain too. I’ve no idea if I’ll get through to him, the site looks like it’s not been updated for a while, but let’s try. I write to introduce myself and say I’d like to visit him if he’s still in London these days. A couple of days later, I hear back. Nahem shares his address, we set a time and date.

Installation view from ‘Nahem Shoa: Into The Light’ at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 2023-24.

Nahem Shoa, 'Group Scene, Notting Hill', 1999, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths
August 2024
It’s a sunny morning and is stuffy on the trains I take from Denmark Hill to Notting Hill. I arrive outside a large, white, quintessentially West London townhouse, now split into five or six flats by the looks of it. I phone Nahem from the porch steps and after a couple of minutes, he comes down to greet me. We ascend four or five flights of stairs, winding our way to the final narrow steps up to the top floor of the building, into which we enter a quiet, dimly lit flat-turned-studio with dozens of paintings stacked up against and on top of each other.
Once we’re cautiously acquainted he starts pulling works aside for me to see and reaches into storage spaces to grab more paintings. He remembers things he’s not seen for a while after an anecdote reminds him of it. Some of them look like the paintings I’ve seen of his in the museums, striking portraits of his friends like Desmond, Desiree and Gbenga. Others I’ve not seen before. They look more like Freud or Uglow, early paintings depicting friends from his youth in West London, with white and non-white sitters captured with sincerity, intensity and a great command of colour and drama.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of red on the floor, I ask if I can pick it up to take a look. Although the canvas is loose and has no stretcher, he holds up a beautiful, small portrait, the reflection of light on the figure’s hair coarsely but perfectly captured with large flecks of paint. He tells me about the sitter, Michelle, who moved to the Portobello Road area from Malaysia. She worked in a juice bar with his friend Kiki, another model of his. Kiki and her girlfriend had been sitting for Nahem whose nascent project about youth, identity and race in his community was starting to come together. I’m startled that a painting this good is on the floor and wonder how many others are hidden away. Also on the floor is a small pamphlet catalogue of an exhibition from 2004, ‘Youth Culture/Multi Culture’, a solo show he had at the museum that is now The Box in Plymouth. In the corridor with barely enough room to squeeze past is a large painting of Gbenga in the manner of Rodin’s The Thinker set against a diagonal blue backdrop and, propped against a plush white pillow. It’s in a heavy, old fashioned frame cropping the edges of the painting but I can tell that this is a special work.

Nahem Shoa, 'Michelle', c.1999, oil on canvas mounted on board. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths

Nahem Shoa, 'Gbenga, Thinking', 1997, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths
After about two hours or so in the studio we head out to a cafe nearby. Nahem tells me more of his story. His training in a figurative tradition that was completely unfashionable at the time, and his utter conviction to keep getting better at it and to paint in a realist style, updated to reflect his own life and surroundings. Born to artist parents of Yemeni-Eritrean heritage on his father’s side and Scottish-Latvian on his mother’s, it was second nature to him to paint London as his cosmopolitan home, even though the art world he wanted to break into didn’t show interest in reflecting that. He’d clearly had a hard time of it, out of step with an industry that had declared figurative painting dead but knowing he wanted to be taken more seriously than a society portraitist and competition painter. He went on to share more poignant and infuriating stories of ignorance and racism that both he and his work were met with routinely throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. They aren’t my stories to tell, but they are numerous and quite devastating.
Things seemed, at last, to be turning around. He tells me about an exhibition of his work he’s co-curating at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. It sounds like another great project and I’m amazed and humbled that he’s done all this through such hard work and determination. He was showing another group of his works from the ‘90s and 2000s and some more recent paintings alongside the likes of Sonia Boyce, Michael Armitage, David Hockney, Stanley Spencer, Frans Hals and many more. Again, his work would be in great company.

Nahem Shoa, Kiki and Helen, 2001, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. Private Collection.
I tell him more about my plans for the gallery and how and why many of the artists I’m planning to work with are outside of London or might need more of a platform in the city. We talk a lot about painting and painters. Nahem has an encyclopedic knowledge of painting. I romanticise how it seems fateful that I should encounter his work in Manchester and Liverpool, where my parents are from, and how my first experiences of Freud, Sickert, Rego, Auerbach and some of our shared heroes came from such regional museum collections. The types of places that were finally paying attention to him. I learn that his portraits are now in museum collections in Southampton, Exeter, Sheffield, Southport, Coventry, Hull, Manchester, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Newcastle and Plymouth.
We agree to work on something, we’ll figure out dates and details another time. It feels a bit rushed but my gut is telling me his work needs to be seen and that there is more than meets the eye. I knew I’d have to dig deeper than what I’d already seen and what was online. Given a lot of his work and early career was before social media and easy digitisation, a lot of context is missing. It didn’t dawn on me until later given how active he’d been in the last couple of years that a show at my gallery would be his first in his hometown for over 20 years.

Nahem Shoa, 'Laila', 1998, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London Photo: Damian Griffiths

Nahem Shoa, 'Sue', 1998, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London Photo: Damian Griffiths
October and November 2024
Over a few more studio visits, he pulled out more portraits from his archive. I was blown away by two small scale individual figures, painted on his kitchen table in the corner of his flat, as he couldn’t afford a studio at the time. One painting is of his dear childhood friend Laila, and another is a past partner, Sue, an American woman who’d been modelling in London at the time. They’re small but quite incredible. We go off on a tangent about Sickert and Vuillard. We talk a lot about how he paints from life, never photographs. His method is old school and he won’t ever change. Nor should he.
Finally he goes into a store cupboard and pulls out a painting that I sense he doesn’t want me to see. I’m blown away by a lean figure staring back at me, cigarette in hand with a piercing gaze, set against a theatrical green curtain. This is Ezz. Nahem always thought of him like a mountain goat, very skinny but muscular and agile. Ezz, unlike most of his sitters, was only in his life for a few months. A painter himself who was a fidgety, chain-smoking, bohemian character who sat for two paintings in 1997 before they lost touch completely. A real group of characters is starting to form and I can see the show coming together before my eyes.
We look at some recent studies and he tells me he feels a bit rusty but it’s hard to see why – he’s clearly got the knack and expresses that he’s hungry to keep working and painting figures from life again. After some thought, we decide to focus on seven paintings to bring people up to speed, spanning 1997 to 2003. A number of them have features in his shows but most of them haven’t seen the light of day for over two decades. We set a date in January and get to work. It’ll be a nice way to kick off the new year and hopefully keep up the roll he’s been on.

Nahem Shoa, Ezz, 1997, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths
December 2024
We’re messaging on WhatsApp and I ask what he wants to call the show. “How about ‘The London Look’?” he says. It’s humorously on the nose but also pointed enough when I think about the reference – a Kate Moss catchphrase for Rimmel London. I think about the nostalgia for and fascination with ‘90s London pop culture, fashion, BritPop and the rest of it. Yet Nahem’s own youth revolved around American-style graffiti writing, breakdancing and following early UK hip hop in Ladbroke Grove. Although unsure at first, I warm to the idea of his reclaiming this phrase. It seems to me that his paintings and his story are as representative, if not more, of the look of London.
'The London Look' is on view at William Hine Gallery until 22nd February 2025.