Jai Chuhan: Claiming Space

Claiming Space, the first solo exhibition by London-based painter Jai Chuhan at Lo Brutto Stahl’s Paris space, is on view from 9 May to 20 June 2026. Spanning works from 1990 to the present, the exhibition traces over three decades of a practice built on layering, erasure, and the slow structuring of mood. Thom Oosterhoff paid a visit.

There is a kind of painter who doesn’t arrive at the canvas with a plan. Like being strapped with an empty backpack before a long hike. Knowing, trusting, that the painting will find itself. A working philosophy that these things come to be through the art of building up, scraping back, building up, and beginning again. How does the cliché go? It’s not about the destination… Jai Chuhan is this kind of painter. Her exhibition Claiming Space, on show at Lo Brutto Stahl’s wicked Paris space, spans a practice from 1990 to the present. A journey, some might say.

Jai Chuhan, Revolving Door, 2022. Oil on canvas — 205 × 150 cm (80 3/4 × 59 1/16 in). Courtesy of the artist and Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris and Basel.

Jai Chuhan, Repose, 2026. Oil on canvas — 90 × 75 cm (35 7/16 × 29 1/2 in). Courtesy of the artist and Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris and Basel.

Jai Chuhan, Conversation III, 2026. Oil on canvas — 120 × 96 cm (47 1/4 × 37 13/16 in). Courtesy of the artist and Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris and Basel.

Jai Chuhan, Dancer I, 2026. Oil on canvas — 90 × 75 cm (35 7/16 × 29 1/2 in). Courtesy of the artist and Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris and Basel.

 

 

Standing in front of these works, you feel that time. Not as nostalgia, but as accumulation. Each canvas is a palimpsest of sorts. Where layers of color, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic, are built up and peeled back over time. A new skin revealed, a new metaphor to the fore, the same unrelenting exploration. She calls this process “structuring mood.” Whether the subject is a self-portrait in an imagined setting, a scene pulled from memory, or a sitter invited into her inner world, the image seeks to represent feeling before representation.

The works, imbued with ancestry, often depict women caught either gazing into another’s gaze. Striking and gentle, they also do the trapping. Conversation III (2026) a brilliant example. Here, a woman in a yellow dress almost seems to rest on the viewer. Is she aware of you? You are certainly aware of her. And this is the tension. Where the next moment depends entirely on us. As curator Omar Kholeif writes, “to each of us, a Jai Chuhan painting is entirely our own.” I don’t think one could say it better than that.

For more information, please consult Lo Brutto Stahl’s website here →

Last Updated on June 15, 2026