Abu Jafar

Abu Jafar is a British-Bangladeshi visual artist whose practice moves across painting, sculpture and installation. His work draws on lived experience, memory and migration, using colour, repetition and accumulated material to examine how individual experience becomes part of a wider human journey.

Painting currently forms a particularly important strand of the practice. Jafar builds surfaces through successive layers of colour, marks and gestures, often returning to works over extended periods. Time therefore operates not simply as a subject but as part of the work’s physical construction. In paintings such as On My Way, individual marks accumulate as records of experience, connecting personal memory and migration with broader questions of movement, belonging, hope and endurance.

These concerns extend into sculpture and installation. Since the 2000s, Jafar has developed large-scale and site-responsive works in which constructed forms interact with landscape, architecture and public space. Projects including Wonder Nature, The Wonder Burghley and On My Way have incorporated wood, glass, stone, drawing and natural environments, extending his recurring interest in journey, possibility and human experience beyond the painted surface.

Born in Jhilna, Patuakhali, Bangladesh, Jafar has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since the early 1990s. He studied Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, followed by studies at Guildhall University, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Philosophy of Arts at the Open University. He became an Associate Member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 2007 and a Fellow of Digswell Arts Trust in 2011. His work has been presented through solo, group and public projects in the UK and internationally, including a retrospective solo exhibition at the Bangladesh National Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka. In 2026 he was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize.