Jasmir Creed
Urban Spectrum

In a perceptive and fiercely observant new body of work, Jasmir Creed turns to the hurried streets of London – a map of terrain she enigmatically describes as her ‘metrotopia’ – to interrogate what it means to be a stranger in the crowd. Having developed a distinctive practice in both oil painting and works on paper, Creed depicts familiar experiences from seeking distraction on the tube to taking a lunch break in a crowded central square, and in so doing examines what are responsibilities to the anonymous stranger with whom we share a distinct intimacy. Often set against iconic London landmarks, from UCL’s Quad to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, the figures in Creed’s paintings are beset by the alienation that can so often accompany urban life. By drawing on influences as diverse as Dexter Dalwood, Dryden Goodwin, Alice Neel, and Matthew Krishanu, and harnessing her own unique approach to compositional montage and spatial logic, Creed emerges as one of the most insightful figurative chronicles of London working in the city today.

In Ranganath Tagore’s poetry collection Gitanjali, which won the Bengali polymath the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, he writes:

Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they are 

Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words 

Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you 

Those who love me do not know that their love brings you to my heart

These are words of longing and communion with the stranger, that figure for whom we do not know and yet, called by the exigencies of circumstance or proximity, we are intimate with. Tagore was a poet of great generosity: so many of his lyric works are animated by the unconditional hospitality of someone who believes themselves to be a citizen of the world, who lived the life of an astute observer of the human carnival. Above all, Tagore was a poet who walked towards, rather than away from, the figure of the foreigner, the downtrodden, the outcast. In Jasmir Creed’s exquisite painting Evergreen (2025) we encounter the statue erected to the memory of Tagore in London’s Gordon Square. The bust of this icon of the Bengal Renaissance, sculpted by the artist Shenda Armery, can be glimpsed on the western garden of the square, and was inaugurated by the then Prince of Wales in 2011. Gordon Square is one of the sixteen squares and gardens in Bloomsbury, that bohemian and intellectual enclave of central London, home to Birkbeck College, SOAS, and University College London, where Creed studies as a PhD-by-research candidate at The Slade School of Fine Arts.

In Creed’s painting, we watch students have their lunch on the emerald grass, lazing about, or discussing some of the finer points of their scholarly pursuits. The organisation of the scene itself suggests a millennial reimagining of one of the defining paintings of Impressionism, Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), where out-of-scale dandies frolic about, contemplate the world around them, and take some well-earned time off. Manet’s painting is itself a reimagining of Giorgione’s La Tempesta (c. 1508). What calls each of these artists to the subject of the grassy verge, where the young and the beautiful sit on nature’s floor and go about their (not so serious) business? Why do paintings such as these solicit such powerful responses within us, so much so that we cannot believe that they are merely depictions of everyday life? In Creed’s painting, her subjects are not stumbled upon in an idyll outside of the city gates, as in the case of Manet and Giorgione, but in the very centre of the metropolis.

‘My canvases are like a map terrain’, Creed tells me, and deal with the inescapable feelings of urban alienation that attend to living in the modern city where, as Rebecca Solnit puts it, ‘one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries.’ It is a truism to say that one is most alone in the crowd, but that is only partly correct. The revelation that one is placed into an ethical relation not by family or admitted community but the involuntary state of merely living, walking, and breathing in a mega-city is a liberatory one. As Solnit reminds us: ‘in small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.’ Creed’s work is also animated by what she calls the ‘transcultural’ experience of being the child of mixed parentage (British and South Asian), as her pictures quietly celebrate those moments of intimacy with the Londoner’s anonymous neighbour. ‘My paintings focus on human emotions in different physical, social and cultural environments’, Creed writes, and are ‘expressed through mark-making using paint and ink in a fast, translucent way or with thick impasto brushstrokes to depict people including portraiture and people travelling in cities or living in domestic interiors.’

But what is so striking about this body of work is how often those figures are set against familiar icons of the city’s architectural monuments. We see graduates fling their mortarboard on the steps of UCL’s iconic Quad, which was designed by William Wilkins, who was also responsible for the neoclassical façade on Trafalgar Square. It is the scene from that vantage point, looking down to Whitehall and past the plinth of Nelson’s Column, which is the subject of a work on paper by Creed. If you were to walk from Trafalgar Square, down by Pall Mall and up Haymarket, you would arrive at Picadilly Circus and experience its disorientating and dizzy advertisements, its hustlers and buskers, and the statue of Eros (or the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, to provide its proper name, named after the Victorian philanthropist who replaced child labour with education). In Circus of Faces (2025), Creed depicts a brisk dusk in cadmium orange and ochre glows. Women wrap up in folded cashmere scarves while the evening remains just warm enough for the bearded and suave man on the right to leave his coat unbuttoned. The sky is a crystalline blue. Enflamed sunlight presses its cheek on the exterior of the Criterion Theatre.

Creed works from a technique of montage, in which she takes several photographs from overlapping perspectives and reimagines those documented scenes afresh in claustrophobic compositions. In these experiments, which simultaneously feel two-dimension and as though foreground seeps into background, Creed has been inspired by Dryden Goodwin’s fusion of drawing and photography. Goodwin sources snapshots of strangers on London’s busy streets before overlaying strange patterns and structures onto the peoples’ faces. In difference to L. S. Lowry’s Picadilly Circus, London (1960), in which the rudimentary and stick-like figures are observed from a distant promontory on the south side of the Circus, Creed’s vision is at eye-level with the strangers; they face us, they see us seeing them, and yet we remain at a remove.

The aesthetic possibilities of montage as compositional technique is central to Creed’s practice. She also uses a form of creative montage for her titles: Metrotopia (2025), the title of two works (an ink on paper, and an oil on canvas), is formed by combining ‘metro’, the prefix relating to a large city and often the moniker for an underground railway system, and ‘topia’, from the Greek for ‘place’ or ‘location’. This near tautology reveals something profound about its subject: a line of seated and distracted commuters on the London Underground, passing the time on their phones or staring into the middle distance, experience the purest form of urban life as the metropolis under the metropolis. The Underground is a fascinating subject for art and literature, not least because it is at once entirely functional and quotidian – the subterranean network and labyrinth of tunnels and lights that facilitates commuters travelling from home to work and back again – but also because it exists entirely underground in a metaphorical sense. It is the ‘hypotopia’ (my neologism) of the ‘below-place’, that evergreen subject of poets from Homer (Hades) to Dante (Inferno) to T. S. Eliot (who wrote of ‘breastless creatures underground’ with ‘lipless grin[s]’ who inhabit ‘Daffodil bulbs instead of balls’). In Creed’s hands, the Underground is a site of extreme alienation and futile distraction but also a place, or sort of place, which offers singular opportunities for acknowledgement of shared experience. In her modernist novel The Waves (1931), Virginia Woolf – who lived on Gordon Square from 1904 to 1907 – wrote of ‘vast numbers’ of passengers who ‘jostled and encountered in trains… the knowing wink of competitors and comrades with a thousand snares and dodges to achieve the same end—to earn our livings’. Creed’s Tube paintings offer an ethical depiction of what it means, as an individual within a collective, to seek pleasure and escape in a city which relentlessly directs us into its service.

Just as Alice Neel’s portraits, as Hilton Als has argued, ‘bear witness to the terror we usually turn away from, namely alienation, disconnect, love’, Creed’s paintings confront these uncomfortable feelings square in the jowl. If Neel’s portraits of uptown and downtown New Yorkers alike ‘resemble feral children in an adult’s world’, due to their ‘puffed-up eyes and heads’, then Creed’s pictures of Londoners deliver a similar effect. While Creed’s impasto-heavy strangers do not look like children as Neel’s do, they exude the same kind of innocence of the world that children express. This is not because children do not see and feel danger or fear discipline, because of course they do, but because they have not yet recognised the forces that trap an adult – Woolf’s ‘snares and dodges’ – into the bonds of wage labour under which they will spend the rest of their working lives. Creed does not, or does not expressly, depict adults working but she does depict what happens in the moments in between work and leisure – the quick bite for lunch, the walk to the tube station at rush hour, the sense of distraction that sometimes consumes in those go-between moments when we are not at our desk but not doing what we would choose to do either. If Tagore reminds us of an important truth – that the stranger is closer to us than we realise – it is not just an acknowledgement of physical proximity in a ‘metrotopia’ like London. It is because the stranger, like each one of us, must make choices in their lives but in circumstances under which they do not have total control. Once we recognise this, the stranger emerges as someone who is no longer so strange to us.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman