In the first solo show of her career, the 28-year-old Anglo-Pakistani artist Khushna Sulaman-Butt’s large-scale portraiture of her friends and family pinioned against the high walls of the Lindon Gallery in central London, is at once a formidable and unfettered experience. It is as though you have stepped into a salon where disparate people of all denominations have come together in a solemn celebration of the dignity of life, irrespective of their differences. A rare experience amidst the discord of the identity politics of our epoch.

There are several things that are at once striking about Khushna’s paintings, beyond the restrained undercurrent of the Spanish Baroque. Her great gift is turning our ways of seeing upside down via the formal rigour of the early masters. Androgyny and the performance of gender are central to her work and her sitters (most of them) appear in drag. While their gaze is seemingly closed off from interpretation, it succeeds in dissolving the dichotomies of normative representation, privileging performativity over fixity. To objectify the experience is not the point. It is rather an invitation (a generous one) to step into her world where the complex interiorities of her sitters commingle and cohere as if to as if to tell a single story and yet live strangely separate realities.

Many of Khushna’s sitters exude a queer subjectivity. From the resplendent figure of her friend Ruhel Ullah, (Rue), 2021, their conventionally masculine body draped in a striking blue sari, to the portrait of Xu Yang (Yang, 2021) who seemingly channels the ballet dancers of Degas, only to reject their imposed femininity to perform a hyper-real bishōjo of Japanese animae. The artist does not dictate her subjects’ dress, and there is a sense of play in her portrait making where the sartorial elements are left to chance, to the people who sit for her. Her surfaces are quietly robust, painted with feeling and restraint using a variety of techniques that are decoratively extravagant as they are psychologically real.

The biographical affiliation in her work is apparent throughout the show, as is her politics. An Amor Mundi – a love of the world, that radically critiques common forms of love and which is quick to erase difference and plurality. How is the body or person equal to another, or even more so to anything else? Is it about sameness or assimilating? How do we transcend the ‘mono-cultural violence’ of our societies that oppose the autonomous freedom to be who we want to be? As a young artist, Sulaman-Butt brings multiple levels of realism to her art - questions of gender, social inequities of our times and the complexities of her sitters’ worlds. Her own personality is a constant in her work; her passionate curiosity about people whether friends or strangers; her distinctive painterly style which depicts a more capacious vision of love and community.

Both Ruhel and Xu Yang are good friends of the artist. She met Ruhel, a Bangladeshi Muslim drag queen/ performer who goes by the sobriquet Minara ‘El Waters, through common friends in London and they soon became close. When Rue sat for Khushna, they brought their own Sari not knowing how to drape it, leaving the artist and the sitter to work out from second-hand memory something that is intrinsic to their cultures, though no longer a part of their own lives. Although very close to their roots, they are also one removed from it as they are born British and raised here. The diasporic intimacy they share is as much a performative space as Ruhel’s gender play. Ruhel’s family have alienated them for their gender non-conformity, however despite that, they repeatedly playing the Muslim persona in traditional garb, which itself is an act of resistance. 

Xu Yang too shares similarities with Ruhel and Kushna, coming from a family of Chinese origin, living in the UK. They once shared a studio space while the artist studied at the Slade school, working alongside, growing in friendship and in practice.

Sulaman-Butt’s art would not be possible without her collaborators and co-conspirators; friends, family and strangers she befriends – a relational form of love. Three Sisters (2021) is also a story of friendship. After a fortuitus encounter on the London underground with three Bangladeshi sisters, the artist invited them to her studio where she spent hours photographing them only to later paint them in, leaving the poignant intimacy of their relationship to rest mostly on the moody coloration of their faces and hands. Sulaman-Butt is a portraitist at root, but there is an uncanniness within the frame which demands consideration on other terms. The work subverts formal academic painting, and particularly portraiture which historically excluded people of colour.

Her brush strokes are bold and precise, undiluted like the gaze of her sitters. Every sweep of the brush moulding their pulsing private interiority both vividly present and inscrutable. Her attention to the minutiae of their drapery evokes a making big of the centuries old tradition of Indian miniature painting of artists such as Mir Sayyid Ali (Tabriz) and Nainsukh of Guler, perhaps an unconscious impulse given she was born and raised in the UK.

Sulaman-Butt frequents The National Gallery in London, returning to Caravaggio, Holbein and Velazquez, observing them closely, both within the frame and outside. These peregrinations are a part of her practice and show up in her work almost as a strategy: to remain in continuous dialogue with the old masters and their methods (visible in the play of light and the contained grandeur of her drapery) while her own preoccupations remain contemporary. 

There are many artists the old masters and contemporary who inform her work. the techniques of Velasquez and Degas, the chance encounters, and communities of Alice Neel and Kehinde Wiley, the source images of Marlene Dumas (she too like Dumas uses photography as her source in painting), physical thresholds of Lisa Brice’s Doors and Paula Rego’s beautiful and the grotesque. Amongst her own contemporaries, there is a tension between the scenes of love, friendship, and solitude vis a vis Salman Toor’s oeuvre which explores similar themes albeit in different contexts.

In the gallery too, her works sit alongside Lubaina Himid’s The Bird Seller: Are You Listening, 2021, whose practice is in the expanded field of political activism and illuminates those in the margins of British society. Within the work of both artists, there is a ponderance of whether their subjects fit in to the places they are shown. Even her own subjectivity as an artist can be called to question in terms of who can represent what and how. She recalls a time when a tutor at Oxford routinely encouraged her to paint from within her communal sphere, from her traditional Muslim-hood, though she was born and raised in Britain, then reading at the country’s most prestigious institution.

While Sulaman-Butt evokes the visual idioms of centuries of art in and outside of the canon, there is something defiantly unselfconscious in her paintings which memorialises figures historically excluded from the art world, as if to say something about our present cultural moment, her own and ours. Her art is a vibrant testimony to other modes of valuable response and interpretation in the long project of undoing established canons.

- Shruti Belliappa

Photos: Matthew Hollow