Zaam Arif: Deewaar
Curated by Ben Broome
9th October, 2025 – 25th October, 2025
Vadehra Art Gallery
Frieze, No.9 Cork Street
London, W1S 3LL
Houston-based painter Zaam Arif makes his London debut at Frieze No.9 Cork Street with Deewar, a series of oil paintings that probe memory, identity and the boundaries that shape human experience.
The Vadehra Art Gallery will present the first London solo exhibition of Houston-based painter Zaam Arif this autumn, bringing the young artist’s work to Frieze No.9 Cork Street from 10 to 25 October 2025. Curated by the London-based Ben Broome, the show, titled Deewar — translated from the Hindi as “the wall” — gathers 18 oil paintings that move between portraiture, still life and surrealist interiors.
Oil on linen, 82 x 98 in
Courtesy of the artist
Though still early in his career, Arif has already staked out a reputation for canvases that contemplate the human condition with a gravity unusual for his age. His work, often informed by the writings of Albert Camus, reflects a search for meaning in a boundless, indifferent world. Figures, borrowed from his personal and social circles, appear in charged moments that combine intimacy with estrangement.
Working in a language shaped by modernist painting but staged like cinematic scenes, Arif constructs fragments of narrative that press on questions of memory, presence and identity. Domestic objects — sofas, books — and elemental motifs, including the sea, serve as metaphors for both the unknowable aspects of life and those that can be reached through experience.
Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 in
Courtesy of the artist
For this exhibition, Arif turns to the idea of the wall — a threshold that at once separates and binds. The title also nods to the 1975 Bollywood film Deewaar, a tale of two brothers from Mumbai who take opposing paths, one into crime and the other into law enforcement. Arif frames these themes of injustice and duality as a reflection on the physical, social and conceptual borders that divide people and places.
Curator Ben Broome writes: “It’s the face of his brother in the eponymous painting Deewaar (The Wall), 2025 but reality ends here. The gold earring, the loose tank top, the smoked cigarette, belong entirely to Arif’s fabrications. The painting is divided — half interior space and half exterior — with the former feeling incongruous amongst the landscape; a sloping peninsula giving way to calm seas. Both environments are a far cry from the circumstances in which this body of work was made: in American suburbia and under the harsh artificial light of a windowless painting studio.”
The resulting works imagine liminal spaces where stories follow their own internal logic, resisting the pull of conventional realism.
Zaam Arif: Deewaar, Curated by Ben Broome opens on the 9th of October, 2025 until the 25th of October, 2025 at Vadehra Art Gallery Frieze, No.9 Cork Street
©2025 Zaam Arif
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