10 July — 7 August
On View in London — The Art Office, 48 Chalcot Rd, London NW1 8LS

Opening Reception: 10 July, 6 - 9PM
Viewing Hours: Thursday by appointment, Saturday & Sunday 11 - 4PM & by appointment

cam.contemporarie is proud to present its inaugural exhibition programme in London, with the debut solo exhibition, I Prefer Living in Color, featuring works by Amrit Singh Sandhu-Clayton. The exhibition is a part of a residency with London-based gallery and art consulting agency The Art Office located in Primrose Hill.

I Prefer Living in Color considers the artist's exploration of legacy, space, time, and transient environments through colour’s capacity to transport and evoke memory, whether it be a meticulously painted patterned rug, or the turmeric coloured canvases serving as the foundation of the physical features of the figures depicted.

Influenced by David Hockney’s energetic and dynamic color combinations, Sandhu-Clayton, reimagines black and white family photos to create histories for people known and unknown, touching on her feelings of groundedness and connections to the present. Her compositions are often reminiscent of the austerity and compositions of a classical Italian fresco, yet they exude a certain playfulness in their abstraction of faces and forms. This allows Sandhu Clayton to explore her own personal and cultural associations with style, fabric, and family lineage as a way to channel stories and conjure pieces of home.

In a unique painting practice, her colour palette, motifs, and forms also appear on carefully considered one of a kind garments that she calls “moving paintings” that take shape on the wearer and their body, bringing all of her painting practices together as wearable artworks that interact and engage with one another through texture, patterns, and vivid color arrangements.

When asked to explain his artistic choices, famously David Hockney once replied: “I prefer living in colour.” For Sandhu-Clayton, she says, “the concept of living in colour weaves both my practices of painting on canvas and on clothes together by highlighting the functionality of the garment and painting, but also to highlight what my practice is about — finding joy in art making.”

Amrit Singh Sandhu-Clayton

Photo Credit: zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal

Amrit Singh Sandhu Clayton (b. 1997) practice merges the worlds of painting and fashion/modeling, working predominantly with oil and water-based pigments, found textiles and embroidery. Born and raised in Punjab, she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute, New York in 2020, and is currently living/working in London. Trained as an oil painter, her work embarks on a metamorphic journey through which the shaping of new forms and visual meanings simulates her own personal adapting to changing environments.Relocating herself indefinitely, her practice is concerned with forming links between her dual vocational pathways.

Recent works range from playing with stretched canvases in the studio to making wearable-portable paintings in the form of various garments. The invented characters in her paintings encounter a liberation from their conventional standpoints as they enter new realms of mobility, versatility and significance parallel to the intuitive material experiments themselves. Sandhu's heritage grounds the base for her curiosities. Looking back in time in a performance of introspection, nostalgia becomes layered with new gatherings of knowledge and experience in foreign yet familiar cultures. Discovering new homes as she travels through life, Sandhu uses old and new family photos as guides, the echoes of which - met with a child-like sensitivity - mould new imaginative beings and spaces distorted and coloured.