Rahim El

Rahim El was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 1984, of Persian and Russian roots, and came to painting through the stage: his early years were spent at the Dushanbe Opera and Ballet Theatre, and music and dance have shaped his painting ever since. He trained at the Stroganov Academy of Art and Industry in Moscow and, after a period of experiment in New York in 2009–2010 and a decade of painting, sculpture and performance in Moscow, settled in Catalonia in 2022, where he completed his studies at the Barcelona Academy of Art.

His canvases and panels are large, gestural and bright: sweeping strokes of blue, green, yellow and red laid down with the whole arm over a white ground, in series with musical titles, ‘Emotions of Colors’, ‘Symphony’, ‘Kairos’, that treat painting as a record of movement and feeling rather than an image of anything.

He has held solo exhibitions in Moscow (‘Emotions of Colors’, Aptekarsky Ogorod, 2019; ‘Without an Example’, Kaolin-Space, 2022) and Barcelona (‘Symphony’, 2024, and ‘Depths of Perception’, 2025, both at Galería Atelier), taken part in group shows and fairs in Madrid, Barcelona, Sitges, Miami and Moscow, and won second prize at the Concurs de Pintura Humet-Saula at Calella in 2023. He is a member of the International Federation of Arts, and his work is in private collections in Europe, Russia and the United States.