Hardeep Pandhal: Inner World

Hardeep Pandhal: Inner World will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in a London public gallery.

Born in Birmingham (1985) to Indian migrants and now living and working between Birmingham and Glasgow, Pandhal uses wall drawings, small and large-scale drawings on paper and animations to create mythical narratives that explore the complexities of contemporary culture, class, power and racial violence. Pandhal’s drawings present his own worldbuilding fragments that combine the recognisable with the abstract, inviting viewers to explore and piece together in an open-ended way. His works draws upon an ambitious range of sources – religion, video games, comics, mainstream music – from the Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh to black metal. In these visions, Pandhal is striving for cultural interdependence, whilst exploring the transformative forces of migration, colonialism and cultural assimilation.

Using a mix of dip pen, Indian ink, brush and airbrushing, the works on show are populated by recurring figurative forms and mark-making gestures. Wryly poking at the narratives of sword and sorcery fiction and role-playing-games from Earthsea to Dungeons and Dragons, these gothic grotesques appear unable to escape the existential dread of their surroundings. Named after a fake family name associated with his childhood, ‘Pintoo’, which was adopted when addressing strangers, Pandhal is building a personal world that he calls the ‘Pintooverse’, one that reveals the fragility of cultural identity, as well as the desire for self-definition, at a moment in global politics when such complexities are increasingly oversimplified and weaponised.

About the artist 

Hardeep Pandhal received his BA from Leeds Beckett University, Leeds in 2007 and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at Tramway, Glasgow (2020); New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2019) and has a forthcoming show at Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including, most recently: New Art Gallery, Walsall (2023); British Art Show (2022-21), Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Art (2020). He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2018) and was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists (2021). Pandhal was the recipient of a Drawing Room Bursary Award in 2015; these Awards were designed to provide opportunities for artists based outside London to spend time in the capital, to use the gallery as a studio to take risks with their work, to carry out research and to network.