Permindar Kaur
Permindar Kaur came to prominence as a sculptor during the 1990s alongside a group of high-profile contemporary artists known as the ‘yBas’ (young British artists). Kaur studied at Sheffield Polytechnic (1986-1989) before graduating with a Masters in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 1992. Her work investigates scale and uses diverse materials, such as steel, copper, and soft polar fleece. Minimalist sculpture is an important influence on Kaur’s work in terms of material, serialism and scale, and her work evades fixed meanings or symbolism. Kaur’s work is concerned with the balance of ‘opposing materials,’ as she herself has noted, and is characterised by contrasts between hard and soft, the industrial and domestic, and threat and comfort. Her British/Sikh identity – born to Punjabi parents in Nottingham – and her experience as a diasporic artist working in Britain during the 1990s has prompted readings of her work in relation to questions of cultural identity, the home, displacement and migration.
Kaur’s exploration of her South Asian heritage in her work meant that in the early part of her career she was invited to exhibit her work in shows curated by the Black British artist Eddie Chambers like, Let the Canvas Come to Life with Dark Faces, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry (1990) and Four x 4: Installations by Sixteen Artists in Four Galleries, in Bristol, Leicester, Preston and Wolverhampton (1991). The art historian Alice Correia has written about Kaur’s difficult relationship to the yBas, despite her participation in a number of key exhibitions including the British Art Show in 1996, due to problematic conceptions of race and multiculturalism in narratives of British art in the 1990s.
