Ben Uri: Audio Adventures

Hormazd Narielwalla was born in 1979 in Mumbai, immigrating to the United Kingdom in 2003, where he subsequently obtained his PhD from the University of Arts, London. Narielwalla has extended his artistic practice to encompass collage, printmaking, artist books, and sculpture, extensively using found materials, such as antique tailoring patterns from Europe. These works create a unique 'archive' e...

Hilary Bourne was born in Guntakal, British India (now India) in 1909. When she was three her family immigrated to Ditchling, Sussex, England where she learned spinning and dyeing from a neighbour. In 1936, Bourne met the designer Barbara Allen and the two established a successful business, becoming pioneers of modern textile design, with clients including the Royal Festival Hall on London's South...

F.N. Souza was born in the village of Saligão, Goa, India, in 1924 and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1929. He immigrated to London, England, in 1949, where he became an acclaimed painter, living and working there until 1967.  Listen to his story here or read the full biography on the BURU database: https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/f-n-souza

Avinash Chandra was born in Shimla (also known as Simla), India, in 1931 and was brought up there and in Delhi, where he studied art. In 1956, he immigrated to London, England on a scholarship to continue his artistic education. In the UK Chandra developed an international career as an exhibited and commissioned artist, his work gradually evolving from landscape towards more sensuous studies of th...

Ashvin Gatha was born in Gujarat, British India (now India) in 1941. After working as a self-taught photographer and photojournalist in India and the USA, Gatha moved to England in 1971 after meeting and marrying Flora, a dancer based in London. In the UK he participated in significant group exhibitions on South Asian photographers and artists. Listen to his story here or read the full biography o...

Photographer, film maker and educator, Arpita Shah was born in Ahmedabad, western India in 1983, immigrating with her family to the UK in 1994 at the age of eleven. Drawing both visually and conceptually on Asian and Eastern mythology, Shah works with photography and film, exploring the intersections of culture, heritage and identity, particularly through portraiture. Arpita Shah lives and works b...

Anish Kapoor was born to a Jewish mother and an Indian Punjabi Hindu father in Bombay (now, Mumbai), India in 1954. He immigrated to England in 1973, attending Hornsey College of Art (BA) and Chelsea School of Art and Design (MA), rising to fame in the 1980s with his geometric and biomorphic sculptures. He has pioneered installation and conceptual art, often in the public domain, working across an...

Ahmed Parvez was born in Rawalpindi, in what was then known as British India (now Pakistan), in 1926. He began pursuing art as a career in 1952, and immigrated to London, England in 1955, where he initially struggled to establish his artistic career. Founding the Pakistan Group of painters, he was also appointed honorary secretary of the Council of Commonwealth Artists in 1955, eventually becoming...

Wendy Pasmore (née Blood) was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1915, moving to England with her family as a child. Her early artistic career was largely curtailed due to family responsibilities (she married the influential artist, Victor Pasmore in 1940) and her art teaching roles during the 1940s and mid-1950s, though she latterly resumed painting and exhibiting. She was a member of the Women’s Interna...

Terence Cuneo was born in London, England in 1907, the son of the Italian-American illustrator Cyrus Cuneo and the British artist Nell Marion Tenison. He trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, contributed illustrations to numerous magazines and served as an official war artist during the Second World War. A traditional artist rather than a modernist, he was celebrated f...

Sonia Boyce was born to Afro-Caribbean parents, who had come to the UK in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, in Islington , London, England in 1962. Considered one of the foremost artists of the Black British Art movement of the 1980s, Boyce's work, across a wide range of media and collaborative experience, examines issues of race, class, and gender, particularly with respect to the dev...

Patrick Procktor was born to English parents in Dublin, Ireland in 1936 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1958–61. He held his first solo show at London's Redfern Gallery in 1963, which proved to be an instant success, both critically and commercially and in 1964 his work featured in the landmark 'New Generation' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, the success of which in...

Lucian Freud was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1922; following Adolf Hitler's accession to the German Chancellorship in 1933, the family moved to Britain to escape racial persecution. Freud studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham and went on to become one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, descr...

Frank Auerbach was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany in 1931; he was sent to England in 1939 and later attended St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art, also studying in David Bomberg's evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic. In 1956, he held his first solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, where he exhibited until 1963; He was represented by Marlborough Ga...

Franz Catzenstein (later Francis Matthiesen) was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, German Empire (now Germany) on 24 July 1897 or 1898. He was the director and owner of the eponymous Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism, he first fled to Zurich, Switzerland and then settled in London, England, where he established the Matthiesen Gallery anew, specialising in European...

Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the second of five children of English parents and moved to London in 1926, his emerging homosexuality having severely strained relations with his parents. Ostensibly self-taught, by the 1950s he had become one of the most acclaimed British painters of the twentieth century, with a roster of exhibitions worldwide in his lifetime and pos...

Eva Frankfurther was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1930; following the rise of National Socialism, the Frankfurther family fled to London in 1939; she spent a year at Stoatley Rough boarding school in Surrey, and was afterwards evactuated to Hertfordshire. After the war she studied at St Martin's School of Art, where her fellow students included Frank Auerbach. Quickly disillusio...

Eddie Chambers was born to Jamaican immigrant parents in Wolverhampton, England in 1960. Working with artists such as Keith Piper, Chambers's early exhibitions centred on ideas of 'Black Art', as a racially conscious form of art making, while his later curatorial projects included solo exhibitions of work by Lesley Sanderson, Eugene Palmer, Denzil Forrester, Medina Hammad, Tam Joseph and Frank Bow...

Barnett Freedman was born to Russian-Jewish émigré parents in Stepney, London in 1901. He took classes at St Martin's School of Art before enrolling at the Royal College of Art and later became known as a painter and for his book cover designs and illustrations. Listen to his story here or read the full biography on the BURU database: https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/barnett-freedman

R. B. Kitaj was born in Chagrin Falls, USA in 1932 into a non-practising Jewish family; after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria and serving in the US Army, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (1958–59), and then at the Royal College of Art, London (1959 –61). Kitaj became a key figure in European and American contemporary painting...

Sin Wai Kin (formerly known as Victoria Sin) was born to a Chinese father and British mother in Toronto, Canada in 1991. Sin moved to London in 2009, where they earned a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art. Using performance, printmaking, and speculative fiction, Sin challenges societal norms of desire and identity, deeply influenced...

Sculptor Jacob Epstein was born into a Polish-Jewish family in New York City, USA in 1880 and raised in Manhattan’s multicultural Lower East Side. He moved to London in 1905 and received his first British commission for the facade of the British Medical Association Building on the Strand in 1907 - the first of many highly controversial public commissions - although his work as a portrait sculptor...

Zeinab Saleh was born in Kenya in 1996. She studied at London’s the Royal Drawing School (2014–15) and the Slade School of Fine Art (2016–19). As co-founder of the London artists' collective, the Muslim Sisterhood, Saleh is a pioneer for genuine diversity and promotes Muslim visibility and creativity in the art world. Listen to her story here or read the full biography on the BURU database: https:...

Uzo Egonu was born in Onitsha, Nigeria in 1931 and immigrated to England in 1945, aged 13, to study art in London at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and at St Martin’s School of Art. Despite only returning to Nigeria once in the 1970s, his painting and printmaking, which blurred the distinction between abstraction and figuration, continued to recall his strong West African and Igbo heritage a...

Sokari Douglas Camp was born in Nigeria in 1958. She immigrated to England in around 1970 to attend boarding school in Totnes, Devon, aged 12. This was followed by a brief period in the USA where she first studied art, then continuing her training in London at the Central School of Art and Design and, later, at the Royal College of Art. Widely exhibited, her work is comprised mainly of large-scale...