When I enter Peer half an hour before the opening of Mohammed Z Rahman’s exhibition Remember to Live, I encounter the gallery’s director, Ellen Greig and guest curator and trustee Eliel Jones sitting nonchalantly side by side on one of Rahman’s upturned wood crates, chatting. It perfectly sets the scene: Rahman’s work is fuelled by conversations. Between friends and family, between people and animals, between reality and dream, with the self.

Rahman, a self-taught artist with a degree in social anthropology, is getting noticed: their painting Divali was purchased by the Government Art Collection last year and Tate’s Frieze Fund enabled the acquisition of two paintings: The Lovers and The Spaghetti House. Through the multiple arched windows of the yellow Spaghetti House people can be seen eating; piles of spaghetti stacked up in front of the house and on the roof, and dangling off a giant fork like an edible streetlamp. Rahman’s paintings always contain something slightly mysterious, absurdist and humorous.

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