ZOOBS ANSARI
Zoobs Ansari, born Zubair Ansari in Chelsea, London, in 1972, is a British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, fine art photography, collage, montage, film, sound, installation, music and performance.
He trained first at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he concentrated on life drawing and the human form, before taking a First Class BA (Hons) at Kingston University with a Commendation in Art Direction. During his studies, he received a commendation in art and design from Fabergé and won a Royal Society of Arts award, which took him to Tokyo as an intern at Shiseido Cosmetics in Ginza. He was subsequently headhunted to the company's European design headquarters in Paris, working on the international Shiseido brand alongside Serge Lutens, then the house's creative director, on image~making and campaign design. He returned to London determined to work only for himself.
Drawing remained the foundation. From it he moved into fine art photography, then began deconstructing his own portraits, layering them with painting, lettering and cut paper, and eventually extending the work into moving image, audio, literature and live performance. The result is a hybrid language in which no single medium holds authority for long.
His subjects have been beauty, masculinity, mortality, addiction, faith and reinvention, and above all the gap between the performed self and the private one. Writing in Elephant, the art historian and Warhol scholar Professor Jean Wainwright observed that Ansari's work "provocatively captures the anxieties and dynamics of our contemporary culture." Wainwright's long~form interview with the artist accompanied Insanity Fair, his first major London exhibition, curated by Jenny Christensson at Elephant West in 2020, which brought together more than thirty works in video, photography and collage.
He has exhibited at Photo London at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Saatchi Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Opera Gallery and Ivy Brown Gallery, New York, and is represented by Opera Gallery. In 2020 and 2021 he documented the release of the elephant Kaavan from thirty~five years of captivity, working with Cher and Free the Wild for the Smithsonian and Paramount+.
A parallel strand of the practice is rooted in Islamic calligraphy, including a personal typographic system that maps Roman letterforms onto Arabic script.
Following a heart attack in January 2025 and open~heart surgery in April 2026, his work has turned inward and toward the body. Monster and the nine drawing series Cat Scan record that passage through charcoal, collage, photography, writing and film.
He lives and works in London.