About

Permindar Kaur’s artistic practice extends over more than three decades during which time she has become one of Britain’s most innovative artists.  Known as much for her deft manipulation of materials including glass, metal, and fabric, as for her evocative exploration of home, childhood, memory and cultural identity, Kaur’s practice defies easy categorisation. With its fastidious regard for scale and form, Kaur’s work is both alluring and contemplative.
(Richard Hylton)

Kaur has exhibited internationally; Overgrown House (2020) is included in Compton Verney’s major new Sculpture in the Park project for 2024 alongside legendary sculptors such as Louise Bourgeoise and Helen Chadwick. Major solo exhibitions include Outgrown (2022), The ArtHouse, Wakefield; Home, 5 Howick Place, London (2020-21); Interlopers, University of Hertfordshire (2016); Hiding Out, Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham Lakeside Arts (2014) and Cold Comfort, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham & Mead Gallery, Coventry (1996).

Her work was recently included in the major Arts Council Collection show Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 (Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham; Levinsky Gallery & The Box, Plymouth; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and The New Arts Gallery, Walsall, 2021 – 2023) and If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022, Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London (2023). At Home with Art, Tate & Hayward Touring (2000), featured Permindar’s Shower Curtain (2000), available for sale in Homebase.

Full CV

Photo © Brian Benson

Contact

News

Nothing is Fixed, 8 June–7 September 2024 John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
Permindar Kaur is a sculptor and installation artist who utilises familiar forms, such as furniture and toys, to create displaced domestic belongings and settings that invoke the uncanny. Transforming John Hansard Gallery into an immersive set of installations, Nothing is Fixed explores fundamental issues of home, belonging, care and safety. Kaur focuses on the intersectionality of identity; how society, family and education inform unique combinations of discrimination and privilege.
Nothing Is Fixed JHG

Opinion – Art, Museums Journal, 22 July 2024. Mela is expanding the definition of what Asian art can be. Sculptor Permindar Kaur on how South Asian festivals are encouraging artists to reclaim their heritage.
Museums Journal

After Hours, Fri 9 July 2024, 6 – 9 pm at Compton Verney, Warwickshire. Chloe Wing and Permindar Kaur in conversation. Hosted by Jo Baring, Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art, and Harriet Loffler, Curator of The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. You’ll learn more about Chloe Wing’s intricate masterpiece Paper Cage as well as Permindar Kaur’s powerful works Turbans and Overgrown House. More info here: Compton Verney

Art Monthly Talk Show on Resonance FM – An audio supplement to Art Monthly magazine. Vaishna Surjid discusses Soumya Sankar Bose’s exhibition ‘Braiding Dusk and Dawn’ at Deflina Foundation, London; Amna Malik reviews Permindar Kaur’s exhibition ‘Nothing is Fixed’ at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; and Henry Broome reports on public art and its place in homelessness and sanitation. Presented by Chris McCormack.
Listen here: Resonance FM: Art Monthly July

Permindar Kaur: Artlyst Interview of the Month June 2024 – Paul Carey-Kent
Permindar Kaur’s thirty-year career survey at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, is titled ‘Nothing is Fixed’. As that suggests, her work maintains ambiguity between possible interpratations, leaving the viewer to decide. Kaur divides the show into five distinct spaces: what you might call ‘the wall of hiding’, ‘the room of rooms’, ‘the bedroom’, ‘the hunting zome’ and ‘black teddy world’.
Read here: Artlyst

Sculpture in the Park, 19 Mar 2024 – May 2027 Compton Verney, Warwickshire. A major new sculpture park will open in the grounds, with works by eight contemporary artists drawn from around the world. The sculpture park will include works from leading UK-based artists such as Sarah Lucas (b.1962), Permindar Kaur (b.1965), British-Ghanian artist Larry Achiampong (b.1984), London-based French artist Nicolas Deshayes (b.1983), Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas (b.1990), French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) and a new commission by Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (b.1971).
Compton Verney

A Spirit Inside 21 Mar – 1 Sept 2024, Compton Verney, Warwickshire.
Drawn from two of the UK’s leading art collections, The Women’s Art Collection and The Ingram Collection, A Spirit Inside will bring together a selection of works spanning over 100 years. Exploring how women and non-binary artists have grappled with the notion and sense of ‘spirit’, the themes range from mythology and internal contemplation to external, often political, expression. A Spirit Inside will feature a range of artists, from historic greats to important contemporaries, such as Leonora Carrington, Winifred Nicholson, Bridget Riley, Miriam Schapiro, Man Fung Yi, and Permindar Kaur, amongst many others.
Compton Verney
Review –Studio International

RA Summer Exhibition 2024, 18 Jun – 18 Aug 2024 Royal Academy, London.
Works by invited artists this year will include Ackroyd & Harvey, Vivien Blackett, Diana Copperwhite, Andrew Pierre Hart, Permindar Kaur, Radhika Khimji, Kathy Prendergast, Rachel Whiteread and Charmaine Watkiss. In addition to the large number of public submissions, Royal Academicians and Honorary Academicians will be showing works, including Ron Arad, Frank Bowling, Michael Craig-Martin, Anselm Kiefer, Conrad Shawcross, Clare Woods and Rose Wylie.
Royal Academy

Mela Monument Sat 13 July, 11 – 10 pm, Hoglands Park, Southampton.
Mela Monument is a series of new outdoor artworks that have been created by artists Permindar Kaur (lead artist), Ren Fang Wooldridge and Rabia Raja, inspired by the Southampton Mela Festival. For Kaur, Mela is about gathering, celebration and making oneself at home. This led her to the idea of making a work with beds and washing lines to say, “this is now our home, where we sleep, and even put out our washing.” On the day of the Southampton Mela Festival, the audience will be able to participate in the making of the work. Using Indian wooden blocks, they can design and print patterns of their choice on the clothes, which will then be hung up, added to the sculpture in the Mela Sculpture Park.
More info here: Mela Monument, JHG

Selector for the 2024 New Contemporaries Open Call with Amalia Pica & Liz Johnson Artur.
New Contemporaries welcome submissions from emerging and early career artists who are final year students, recent graduates and post-graduate students from UK art schools and alternative learning programmes.
New Contemporaries

Past 

Sculpture in the Park Curator’s Tour  Sat 6 July 2024, Compton Verney, Warwickshire with art critic, writer and curator Hettie Judah, artist Permindar Kaur and Compton Verney’s Director of Creative Programmes and Engagement Abigail Viner. A Sculpture Tour of the grounds where you’ll explore our Sculpture in the Park with a focus on the work Overgrown House, exploring notions of house and home. A guided tour of the current exhibition A Spirit Inside.  This exhibition is drawn from two of the UK’s leading art collections and features Permindar Kaur’s Turbans among many other inspiring pieces. Followed by a Q&A with Permindar and Hettie.
More info: Compton Verney

Indian Artists in Britain Symposium Tue 26th March 2024, 9.30 -3.30 pm Broadway Gallery, Letchworth.
To coincide with the Broadway Gallery current exhibition ‘Amal Ghosh: Bridge’ we are hosting a symposium that brings together experts in Art Historians, Researchers and Practising Artists to facilitate an discussions to chart the history and representation of Indian Artists in the British arts. Broadway Gallery

Bitch Magic, 26 Jan – 2 March 2024, Alma Pearl Gallery, London.
Bitch Magic brings together a cross-generational group of women and non-binary artists who align with ‘the feminine’ and whose work offers radical feminist perspectives through themes associated with folklore, the magical or the esoteric. With Renate Bertlmann, Cullinan Richards, Ayla Dymterko, Permindar Kaur, Rebecca Parkin, Tai Shani, Penny Slinger, Georgina Starr & Unyimeabasi Udoh.
Alma Pearl Gallery

Fine Art Talks, British School at Rome online talk. The BSR is pleased to present the second event of the FA Talks series. On 28 February 2024 at 6pm, artist Permindar Kaur will give a talk about her practice. Watch here: British School at Rome – youtube

Artist Spotlight in Cultural Comms, Jan 16 2024. Interview about the work Independence (1998) at Saatchi Gallery until Jan 22nd.

If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022,  15 Nov – 22 Jan 2024, Saatchi Gallery, London. As part of our Season of Sculpture, our co-headline Winter exhibition, If Not Now, When? will feature 29 remarkable female sculptors, celebrating their contributions to the world of art from the 1960s to now. The exhibition will feature pieces by renowned artists including Permindar Kaur, Katrina Cowling, Phyllida Barlow, Helen and Cornelia Parker. The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Anna Douglas and Dr Kerry Harker.
Saatchi Gallery

What Should Be In A National Art Collection? 13 Sept – 1 Dec 2023, The School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Working in collaboration with the Arts Council Collection, students on the MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies (2022-2023) ask visitors to reflect on the consequences of collecting art for the nation. They do so through the exhibition and interpretation of key artworks by 23 postwar British artists.
The School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

Are You A Women In Authority? 30 Sept -16th Nov 2023, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton.
Broken Grey Wires and Phoenix Art Space present an exhibition of work by artists who explore empowerment, gender, and community in their practice. Janine Antoni – Bobby Baker  – Lizz Brady – kevanté ac cash – Lynn Hershman Leeson  – Permindar Kaur – Sarah Lucas – Sarah Maple  – Tracey Moffatt – Jade Montserrat – Zanele Muholi – Anya Paintsil – Charlotte Prodger – Martha Rosler – Carol Sommer
Phoenix Art Space

Frieze London 2023 11 – 15 Oct 2023 with Jhaveri Contemporary, London. UK
For Frieze London, Jhaveri Contemporary’s booth tuFrench-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)rns to ecology and brings together artists who focus on the species who co-inhabit our environment. Animal and plant life are intertwined in works that bridge the real, the live, the extinct, and imagined. The entry point is a herd of steel horse sculptures by Permindar Kaur. Child-like in their simplicity and installed low to the ground, akin to fledgling foals, their legs buckle beneath them. Kaur speaks of the ‘playful freedom introduced’ that upends the conventional image of horses as symbols of status and class. The twisted, modular forms, referencing the darker side of play and childhood imagination, ultimately confine the materially robust animals to their plinth.
Jhaveri Contemporary

Researching women in sculpture: a discussion event at the Henry Moore Institute, published in ‘Pioneering Women’ … the special issue of The Sculpture Journal 32.1, March 2023
Full text here: Sculpture Journal

Friday Dispatch – Contemporary Art Society, Fri 24 Feb 2023 by Christine Takengny. Review of The Room, Niru Ratnam Gallery
Contemporary Art Society

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

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

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