Omar Majeed (b. 1984) is a para-disciplinary artist with a background in photography, conceptual design, print, and fine art. Creating art in a host of media: visual, auditory, and written, alongside fashion and publishing, all of which he approaches with the expediency of an obsessive and aggressive hobbyist with playful, creative abandon.
Art is a broad church, and its disciples come in myriad forms, wear assorted changeable hats, and create work in every possible discipline. As the old adage goes: Jack of all trades, and master of none… but oftentimes better than a master of one. The ending of this saying has been cruelly excised by a perhaps jealous public who like their artists to specialise, and repeat the same art work over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth… Omar prefers to work “ad hoc”, and equates improvisation with freedom. He often utilises surrealist strategies such as automatism and his own philosophy of “Anti-Perfectionism” which celebrates happy accidents, DIY culture, have-a-go punk bravado, instinctual mark-making, serendipitous collecting of hoarded objects that somehow go together for readymade sculptures; a score of inky toner printed zines, a brace of photobooks, poetry books, novels, even a biography.
He has made records with punk band Jazz Mags, electronica with 010 surrender, and much much more! He has even dabbled with embroidery, gone through a Shrinkles period as an adult, and has a facilitatory art practice with his toddler who is already overtaking her fathers draftsmanship and painting skills, (despite her being four years old and him being forty and having a Masters’ in Fine Art and been doing this long enough for finesse to have crept in a bit if he’d let it). Partly to blame for this wilful shoddiness are US antifolk band The Moldy Peaches, who “sang”: “Me and my friends are so smart, we invented this new kind of art: post-modernist throwing darts…” Omar Majeed has also made an art out of nuanced, quasi-ironic self-aggrandisement as a counterweight to feeling somewhat ignored and unimportant. He has carried various mental health diagnoses over the past couple of decades, and had he not spent so much time at art college recovering from psychotic episodes, he might have been a proper outsider artist. Yet he still sees himself in earnest as a sort of shy shamanic seer, dragging visions and thoughts from the unconscious with the little aerial in his brain and an entrenched love of chaos and randomness. He just can’t help creating, and does it to keep alive and relatively sane.
Omar Majeed - Compulsion - (Mid Career Retrospective)
With his new exhibition "Compulsion" Omar Majeed attempts to tie together two decades or more of fevered creative activity in a variety of media into something coherent and meaningful. Having catalogued a large proportion of his work into an Excel spreadsheet, he feels he has an overview of his themes and creative concerns. Among the ideas explored are psychology and the struggle with mental health, existential concerns, friendship, loneliness, national identity, fragmentation and wholeness, divination, the Numinous, love, sex, absurdity, and occasionally veers into politics. Hailing from Herefordshire, he took a studio at Artsite 3 before his Masters' studies, painting portraits of people he knew in broad brushstrokes, and exploring intuitive painting of imagined scenes and emotional landscapes via a process based and improvisational painting practice, usually in oils. Often refusing to envisage an end result, Omar lets his instincts and deeper self guide the process, drawing visions from the deep well within, or plucking symbols from the sky. Photography plays an equal part in his practice, as he documents his life and surroundings with curious indiscrimination; drawn as he is to the transcendent and unusual, the eruptions inside the mundane, overlooked, and everyday. Art is seen everywhere, potentially in everything, so he goes seeking, fishing for meaning and his work reflects a near-shamanic drawing of life-giving meaning and purpose out of the confusing and mundane everyday world. He has made video installations and several short films, exploring similar serious themes, often with palate cleansing humour. He feels life is short and it is good to make some impact on the world before we leave. This exhibition is intended not to be exhaustive of his voluminous output, but to be a synecdoche of the sprawling whole, and a carnival for the senses.