Shakil Solanki

5 September 2022

Shakil Solanki ( b. 1997) was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2019, and is currently based in Cape Town, practising as an artist, working primarily within the mediums of painting and printmaking. Solanki interrogates dynamics of intimacy, using the space of a secret garden to explore dualities of tenderness, desire and violence. His experiences as a queer brown man remain central to his practice, with classical Eastern art standing as a prominent source of inspiration. The trope of a secret garden is used as a liminal space, where contrasting emotions of trauma and longing exist hand-in-hand with moments of stillness, using the theme of intimacy as a point of convergence to explore its many dynamics, evoked within many shades of the colour blue.