Literature

Pink, green and blue forms crowd the canvas, petal-like and bodily, dense as undergrowth. The image hovers near abstraction, vegetal and fleshy at once, with no clear figure and no enclosing room. El-Kadhi Brown (b. 1996, London) paints in oil in soft, gestural layers, and here her interest in the body merges fully with plant life, skin and foliage worked from the same pink and green. A Royal College of Art graduate, she treats painting as a way of pulling sensation up from beneath the surface, and the title makes the equation plain: the forest given flesh, growth and the human body folded into a single tissue.