ELECTED ARWS 2026
Ferha Farooqui studied at Winchester School of Art and was tutored by Gillian Ayres, Graham Crowley, William Crozier and Vanessa Jackson. Ferha is a painter in watercolour, acrylic and mixed media. She has exhibited widely in solo, and group exhibitions in the UK including The RWS Open in 2025 & 2026, where she was awarded the David Benson Memorial Award 2026. Her work has been shown at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The Dulwich Gallery Open, The Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Devon and Graham Crowley’s ‘Silent Disco 2026’. She has taken part in many exhibitions across the UK and overseas including Gibraltar and Germany. Her work can be found in the V&A Print Collection, The Guildhall Art Gallery (permanent collection), The Newham Heritage Archives and Google Arts & Culture as well as in many private collections.
In 2019, she jointly set up and is now sole curator of The Urban Contemporaries Group bringing together early, mid-career & established painters interested in exploring the urban experience. She co-curated the exhibition ‘In the footsteps of the East London Group’ at the Nunnery Gallery in 2024 with a successful accompanying book of the same title, published by Batsford Book, which can be found in many art institutions.
‘I am a painter and I’ve lived and worked in East London since the early 1970s. My paintings attempt to depict the urgency, pace and ‘drama’ of the contemporary urban experience and is grounded in observations of everyday life. My works comprise human stories observed in the urban landscape and takes inspiration from the ‘lived realities’ of people in contemporary Britain. Composing and painting in watercolour allows for a more immediate observation of the energy and continuous movement of crowds. I am interested in creating distortions and ruptures, multiple viewpoints and tipping/rotating planes to provide punctuation to the ‘theatre’ of urban streets and ‘opening a window’ to and reflecting upon the intensity of living in the modern age’.