About Me
I’m Aalim Chowdhry, an artist based in London. I’ve been painting for about ten years, since I was fifteen or sixteen. My first serious oil paintings were rough attempts at recreating work I loved. Clumsy at the time, but that’s where I found out how much this medium could do.
I studied Mechanical Engineering at Loughborough University, not art. Visual art stayed the constant thing underneath it though, all the way through. My training leans on classical technique, including recreations from Bargue’s drawing course, and I’ve been experimenting with alla prima more recently, mostly for commissions.
I sit between two instincts and I don’t think I’ll ever fully pick one. I love realism. The discipline of it, the history of it, painting from Goya back through the old masters. But the work that’s actually changed how I see was rawer than that. Early surrealism, abstract expressionism, things that weren’t trying to show off technical skill so much as show me something true. Chirico, Dali, Magritte, that kind of dreamlike blur between the real and the symbolic. I’m drawn to history and myth too, anthropology, the history of ideas, and all of that ends up in every piece I make, whether it’s a personal painting or a commission.
Technically, a lot of my process leans on John Singer Sargent. Tightly controlled values in the face of a portrait, set against much looser, more expressive handling everywhere else, the clothes, the background, the incidental detail. That’s actually how we see people in real life, I think. We’re wired to read a face with far more precision than we read someone’s jacket or the room around them. Photography rarely captures that same hierarchy. Charcoal lets me push that contrast hard.
Exhibitions and History
My first exhibition was an open call at Leicester Museum, when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I built the frame myself, it wasn’t great, but it was mine, and I sold that painting for £150 to someone I never got to meet. I still think about who bought it. That £150 meant as much to me at the time as the size of my eventual student debt did on the other side of the ledger.
After that came an online exhibition during Covid lockdown, quiet, understandably, no one was going to galleries in person. Then Sock Gallery in Loughborough, where I showed pieces that meant a lot to me personally.
I moved to London a couple of years ago and started working from a studio in Marylebone, both commissions and my own surrealist pieces. I found Marylebone Gallery almost by accident, after walking past it a few times and finally working up the nerve to ask if they’d take my work. Michael, who ran it, was generous with my paintings from the start, and a few pieces are still there being shown now.
I also do a lot of life drawing, which keeps the fundamentals honest.
I’m always up for collaborating, exhibiting, or just talking to people about the work, in London and further out. If you want to see more of it in person, Marylebone Gallery is the place to ask.