Hales is delighted to announce the representation of Shezad Dawood, in collaboration with Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India and Nuhwa Contemporary, Seoul, Korea. Dawood’s work will be presented by Hales at Frieze London in October 2026, ahead of his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2027.
Shezad Dawood (b. 1974, London, UK) studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art before completing a PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is a Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster. Dawood lives and works in London.
Dawood is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, textiles, sculpture, film and digital media. Interweaving stories, realities and symbolism, he creates richly layered works that consider the relationships between ecology, architecture, history and lived experience. At the centre of his practice is an approach he describes as 'world-building', through which speculative and alternative futures become a means of examining the conditions of the present.
Working across disciplines and in dialogue with different communities, academics and specialists, Dawood develops expansive bodies of work that bring together multiple narratives and systems of knowledge. His projects frequently unfold over extended periods of time and across different media, exploring questions of environment, migration, memory, embodiment and the ways in which histories are constructed and retold.
Central to Dawood's method of working is his engagement with canvas as a place where many of the central concerns of his wider practice (ecology, architecture, hybridity, migration, speculative futures and cross-cultural histories) are condensed into a single pictorial field. Frequently working across vintage textiles, patterned fabrics and conventional canvas, he treats each as an active component of the image, allowing its existing histories, motifs and material associations to intersect with painted forms. Botanical imagery, geometric abstraction and architectural structures recur throughout his work, creating layered pictorial spaces in which distinctions between figure and structure, interior and exterior, and the natural and technological become unpredictable. Drawing on cyclical research interests ranging from modernist architecture and decorative traditions to ecology, migration histories and fiction, Dawood approaches painting as a form of world-building: a space in which disparate histories and systems of knowledge can coexist and generate new narratives.
