Muzammil Hussain
Muzammil Hussain (b. 1996, Kanpur, India) paints human-animal hybrids in oil: figures built from animal silhouettes and everyday attributes, somewhere between toy, mythology and the visual repertoire of social media.
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ABOUT
Muzammil Hussain (b. 1996, Kanpur, India) lives and works in Groningen and paints primarily in oil on canvas. He studied Art and Design at Arts University Bournemouth (2015–2016) in England and continued his training at AKI, ArtEZ in Enschede (2018–2021). In 2024 he graduated from the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. In 2022 he became one of the winners of the Buning Brongers Prize, the biennial Dutch prize for young painters and the largest private art prize in the country.
His paintings rarely begin with a fully formed idea. They emerge intuitively, as an attempt to bring something from the subconscious into tangible form. That means Hussain does not always understand what he is looking at while working and it is precisely there, he suggests, that the challenge lies, since people generally seek certainty and cling to the illusion of control. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia, intimacy, eroticism, frustration, shame and hope are the driving forces, with a pronounced fascination for history, psychology and psychoanalysis in the background.
Where the earlier work moved between full abstraction and figurative storytelling, the recent work has become emphatically pictorial. In it, Hussain explores the animal kingdom and its parallels with human behaviour. The hybrids originate in detailed animal drawings that he gradually reduces to pared-back figures, to which he adds human attributes and everyday objects. He then places them in ordinary situations. What stands there can be read in several ways: as a toy, as a WhatsApp sticker, as a real-life NFT collection, as Pokémon or as a deity in the temple of capitalism.
Partying, decadence and extravagance sit alongside love, simplicity and innocence, serving at once as inspiration and as critique of societal norms. Hip-hop, pop culture and the logic of social media are unmistakably present, while the motif itself is ancient: human-animal hybrids have existed for centuries, from Egyptian gods to Greek mythology and Hindu imagery. Hussain regards the animal as a universal language legible regardless of gender, age or nationality and uses it to raise questions of identity and existence.
The Buning Brongers award ceremony in November 2022 was accompanied by an exhibition at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam and a publication; Mister Motley interviewed the prizewinners at length. In 2023 his work featured in the Launch Exhibition by Curated By at Huis Vasari in Amsterdam and at the Springboard Art Fair in Utrecht. A solo presentation followed at NAP+ Art Fair in 2024, discussed by Karin Abdullah Kahn-Feenstra in Museumkijker. In early 2025 he took part in the exhibition LONGINGS at project space SIGN in Groningen.