Permindar Kaur is a sculpture/ installation artist, whose approach to art is playful, using childlike objects to explore the territory of cultural identity, home and belonging. She uses simple forms, for instance furniture (beds, cots and chairs) and toys (soft, brightly coloured figures, trucks and animal forms). These objects resemble displaced domestic belongings, which have been distorted and manipulated to invoke the uncanny. They are deceptively familiar in their appearance and initially might remind the viewer of innocence, childhood and play belying their sinister undertones.

Kaur has exhibited internationally; major solo exhibitions include Outgrown (2022), The ArtHouse, Wakefield; Home, 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG (2020-21); Interlopers, University of Hertfordshire (2016); Hiding Out, Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham Lakeside Arts (2014); Untitled, Berwick Gymnasium Art Gallery, Berwick (1999) and Cold Comfort, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Mead Gallery, Coventry (1996).

Major group exhibition include Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 (2021-23) YSP & UK tour; Ikon in the 90’s, Ikon Gallery (2021);  Animals & Us, Turner Contemporary (2018); At Home with Art, Tate Britain, London and touring (2000); Hot Air, Granship, Shizouka Arts Centre, Japan (1999); Pictura Britannica, Art from Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997); British Art Show, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff (1995). Permindar Kaur completed her MA at Glasgow School of Art, she lives and works in the UK.

Kaur has taken part in a number of talks at leading institutions including at the Tate, Ikon Gallery and Lakeside Arts.
Visit the Talks page

Full CV

The Room, 25 Jan – 25 Feb 2023, Niru Ratnam Gallery, London. Writing on Permindar Kaur’s recent solo exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield the art critic Hettie Judah observed: “Blending the soft with the spiky, comfort with threat, the domestic with hints of something wild, Permindar Kaur’s sculptures explore the subtleties of belonging.” Since her emergence into the British art scene in the early 1990s, Kaur’s practice has embraced incongruous dualities. In her work the domestic is both a place of shelter and threat. Motifs such as beds, cushions and childhood toys took on a more surreal and disturbing quality through Kaur’s manipulation of scale and juxtaposition of materials.
View works here: Niru Ratnam Gallery

Breaking The Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, 21 October – 16 April 2023. The New Art Gallery Walsall. An Arts Council Touring exhibition. Breaking the Mould is the first extensive survey of post-war British sculpture by artists identifying as women in a public institution. Spanning more than seventy years and exploring the work of fifty sculptors, this exhibition provides a radical recalibration, addressing the many accounts of British sculpture that have marginalised women or airbrushed their work out of the art historical canon altogether and includes sculptors such as Phyllida Barlow, Rachel Whiteread, Holly Hendry, Sarah Lucas, Veronica Ryan, Anthea Hamilton, and Cornelia Parker.
More Info here: New Art Gallery Walsall

Permindar Kaur – interview with Hettie Judah, Sept 16 2022, Studio International
“It’s hard to get a balance in the work: an equal amount of threat and an equal amount of softness’. The sculptor talks to us about her playful use of the domestic realm to explore feelings of belonging and cultural identity.
Watch here: Studio International

Shortlisted for Freelands Award 2022
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, will present a landmark exhibition by Permindar Kaur in summer 2024, including a range of her distinctive playful handmade sculptures, that resemble domestic objects and huggable toys. Small steel figures and welded furniture explore the heightened anxiety and power dynamics of public and private space.
Freelands Foundation

If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022,  31 March – 24 September 2023, The Hepworth Wakfield, Wakefield. This exhibition will present the outcomes of a significant research project, Hepworth’s Progeny, hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield (2021-23) in collaboration with art historian Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green. The project generated a survey of women across Britain working in sculpture today and a comparative study with the stories of women who responded to a parallel survey issued by Lorna Green in 1988.
Hepworth Wakefield

Outgrown publication – Limited edition, signed, softback on removable screen-printed greyboard.
40 pages, published 2022 by The Art House. ISBN: 1-908432-19-5
Texts by Natalie Rudd, writer, independent curator, and researcher, and Damon Jackson-Waldock, Programme Director, The Art House. Buy here: Arthouse shop
Overgrown House Limited Edition Screen Print for ArtHouse.
Shop – ArtHouse

Permindar Kaur: Locating a ‘Black’ Artist in Narratives of British Art in the 1990s. Essay by Alice Correia for Art History, June 2021
This special issue of Art History looks closely at the multi-faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range essays in different formats by artists and art historians to centralize the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism.
Read full essay here: Art History

The catalogue for HOME is now available with 21 colour images and critical texts by Dr Alice Correia and Dr Eddie Chambers. Copies are available for purchase at £10.
Email: mark@theartistsagency.co.uk The Artist Agency
Or Ikon Gallery Shop