Mohammed Z Rahman: Remember to Live

Rahman’s comfort zone is in the miniature, but with a vision that is hopeful not hellish, evoking the small and intimate moments of everyday lives, the people and houses bathed in deep, saturated colours

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Remember to Live, installation view, Peer, London, 2025. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Photo: Andy Keate.

Peer, London
15 February – 3 May 2025

by SABINE CASPARIE

When I enter Peer half an hour before the opening of Mohammed Z Rahman’s exhibition Remember to Live, I encounter the gallery’s director, Ellen Greig and guest curator and trustee Eliel Jones sitting nonchalantly side by side on one of Rahman’s upturned wood crates, chatting. It perfectly sets the scene: Rahman’s work is fuelled by conversations. Between friends and family, between people and animals, between reality and dream, with the self.

Rahman, a self-taught artist with a degree in social anthropology, is getting noticed: their painting Divali was purchased by the Government Art Collection last year and Tate’s Frieze Fund enabled the acquisition of two paintings: The Lovers and The Spaghetti House. Through the multiple arched windows of the yellow Spaghetti House people can be seen eating; piles of spaghetti stacked up in front of the house and on the roof, and dangling off a giant fork like an edible streetlamp. Rahman’s paintings always contain something slightly mysterious, absurdist and humorous.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Remember to Live, installation view, Peer, London, 2025. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Photo: Andy Keate.

There are two paintings of houses at Peer, mirror images installed side by side. They are cross-sections this time. The houses’ lower levels host a group of seamstresses making colourful clothes, stacked on a ladder reaching up to the third floor, where they are draped over washing lines that cut through the painting horizontally, like domestic horizons. On the upper floors are more people, going about their business: taking food from the fridge, having a bath. There are animals, too: bright green parakeets like the ones populating many London parks, and a cat and a dog which don’t seem to mind one another. It is an apt metaphor for the people: being together yet also doing their own thing. On closer looking – and a lot of closeup inspection is required for Rahman’s work, the crowd at the opening are all peeking and leaning in – there is a boy carrying a skateboard, the image similar to another painting in the next room of the artist’s brother as a boy with his skateboard in a street in Ilford, east London. Elements of one painting returning in a different form in another is one of Rahman’s magical tricks. Their paintings always veer between revealing and concealing.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Khodori Bibi’s Little Farmers. Installation view, Peer, London, 2025. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Photo: Andy Keate.

“I see my works as an oral history project,” the artist tells me at the opening. They are wearing a tailored, navy pinstripe suit that is sharp and flamboyant, much like the paintings. “I am an anthropologist who’s interested in material culture.” Rahman points to Khodori Bibi’s Little Farmers, a painting of five figures in a field, the father working, the mother with a tool in her hand, the children pouring water over lush, green plants. The work is based on a memory of the artist’s mother growing up and working on a tobacco patch in rural Bangladesh. The figures are larger than those in the other works, as if to amplify the importance of ancestry and tradition, or maybe just the importance of the figure of the mother.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Alleycats’ Parade, 2025. Acrylic on board, three 40 x 50 cm panels, total 40 x 150 cm. Installation view, Peer, London, 2025. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Photo: Andy Keate.

Another painting shows five cats, also in actual sizes, but Rahman’s comfort zone is really in the miniature. In Prem’s Petshop (a reference to the artist Prem Sahib), a figure stands in the middle of a pet shop, colourful birds in cages on one side and small terrariums on the other, exquisite mini-landscapes in greens and browns, lush and bucolic. Rahman tells me that Hieronymus Bosch is one of their inspirations and I can see that, although Rahman emphasises the hopeful over the hellish. Their vision is warm, their people and houses all bathed in deep, saturated colours: lush maroons, forest greens, indigo blues, warm ochres.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Safe Landing, 2025 (detail). Acrylic on 48 matchboxes arranged in a grid across 12 India ink stained wooden shelves. Dimensions variable. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Image credit Andy Keate.

There is more than the personal. The crate titled Memento Vivere is a reference to immigrants working in industrial dockyards, and also to the Aids crisis around the time the artist’s parents arrived in the UK in 1989. But I find Rahman’s strength not in these grander, sociopolitical stories but in their imaginative evoking of the small and intimate moments of everyday live. There is that same cross-referencing in the use of the bare wood from the crate: it reappears in the wood that the artist used to frame the gallery’s passage from one room to the other.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Safe Landing, 2025. Acrylic on 48 matchboxes arranged in a grid across 12 India ink stained wooden shelves. Dimensions variable. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Image credit Andy Keate.

An installation of matchboxes painted in deep blue and red is stacked on small shelves in a grid of six horizontal and two vertical rows. These are the only works in the exhibition without humans; they each contain a small object or animal: a teapot, the parakeets, shards of glass. “The glass is reference to the violence that is sometimes experienced by immigrants, their windows smashed,” Rahman explains, “like the blue and the red. There is light in our world but also darkness.”

Mohammed Z. Rahman, Safe Landing, 2025 (detail). Acrylic on 48 matchboxes arranged in a grid across 12 India ink stained wooden shelves. Dimensions variable. Commissioned and produced by Peer. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid. Image credit Andy Keate.

The last work of the exhibition, Night Shift (The Dreamer), is modest in size. A figure in blue pyjamas lies stretched out on the ochre sheets of a bed, sleeping. This a portrait of the artist – the same build, the same black moustache. The pose is relaxed. Here lies someone who is tired and content: from working hard, from turning what they love into art. It is one of the humblest and most moving self-portraits I have seen.

There are many artists who convey their personal histories to reflect larger, political ones. What sets Rahman’s work apart is the meta-narrative that suffuses the larger histories and stories of migration. Rahman’s paintings do more than reflect the influence of the past in the present; they offer different levels of engagement and immersion through what the artist calls “dream aesthetics”. The objects and symbols that reappear throughout their paintings, in different forms and sizes, are like titillating clues. But it is a riddle that maybe we are not supposed to solve.

In the Night Shift (The Dreamer) another tiny object stands out: a smartphone on the pillow. The gadget is a refreshing occurrence amid the folk-inspired elements and the naive painting style: a reference to our current, hyperconnected world. The phone is connected and charging – a great metaphor for the exhibition itself. The energy in the gallery is palpable, from the paintings and the artist and the people who are wondering and discussing the works together. Rahman reminds us of our shared connection in the pursuit of living, sometimes difficult, often exhilarating.