British artists Mal Fostock and Bushra Fakhoury are unveiling never-before-seen works during Frieze at Mall Galleries, Pall Mall, London. INCLUSION in the West Gallery is the 1st UK solo exhibition for Mal Fostock. Bushra Fakhoury will be exhibiting her new show TRANSMUTE in the North Galleries and this will also include recent collaboration works with her son Mal Fostock.
They will display a combined 100+ pieces across print, painting, and sculpture.
Mal is a British artist, living and working in the UK. He is a multifaceted artist whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and photography, with a focus on exploring the human form and spirit. Mal’s artistic journey has been shaped by a blend of cultural influences and deep commitment to his craft.
Though a private individual, Mal’s art speaks volumes. His exhibitions in the UK and US, including a notable show in Miami with Romero Britto and Sabina Forbes II, have secured his place in private collections and the broader art world.
This upcoming exhibition, which showcases for the first time the wide range of his artistic practice, offers a glimpse into the complexity of the human spirit, revealing Mal’s dedication to his craft and ongoing exploration of the human condition.
“To discover and be in touch with something fundamental gives meaning to my life. I am always evaluating what is most important to me. To learn and to grow as a person excites me. The art is an embrace of life. It flows into many disciplines: painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and print making, using traditional methods and also the technology of our time. People are a never-ending source of inspiration to me. Nothing is more fascinating to me or more challenging than to create a portrait.”
Mal: A Visual Journey Through Devotion and Displacement
Mal’s practice unfolds as a meditation on faith, memory, and the weight of human experience. Moving between graphite, painterly dissolution, sculpture and photography, these works create a visual narrative that embraces both the sacred and the profane in contemporary life.
Sacred Objects, Profane Hands
A rosary glinting in weathered palms captures the duality at the heart of Mal’s practice. The liturgical gravity of the beads meets the roughness of labour-marked skin. Faith here is refracted through survival – a constant negotiation between the spiritual and the corporeal.
Performance as Document
A masked figure on a cobbled street, a woman in Lolita style outfit outside a Parisian doorway: both explore identity as theatre. Costumes, gestures and urban backdrops turn daily life into performance, where displacement is enacted through persona. The image is part commedia dell’arte, part social documentary – blurring carnival with commentary.
The Artist’s Gaze
In self-portrait, Mal confronts the viewer directly. Stark light sharpens the angular features, isolating the figure against a blurred backdrop. Here the artist is both subject and interrogator – an image that unsettles as much as it engages, positioning identity as something under constant scrutiny.
Machines of Memory
Graphite interiors – subway cars, crouching bodies, bundled passengers – render displacement with forensic detail. Every line speaks of confinement and endurance. These works are less portraits of individuals than diagrams of migration: anonymous, mechanical, stripped of agency, yet profoundly human.
Dissolution of Form
Artworks such as Prayer or Reverie dissolve the solidity of earlier works. Heads emerge from ochre fields only to blur back into them. Flesh becomes atmosphere, features become suggestion. Identity here is fragile – slipping between presence and absence, faith and doubt.
Portraits of Weight and Stillness
Bronze, graphite and paint return us to the singular body: an elder’s folded hands, a sitter’s reluctant stare, a young man clasping his knees. Mal monumentalises stillness, showing strength not in action but in endurance.
Gesture and Freedom
In contrast, works like Chai and Free Spirit use line and colour with looseness. A face rendered in white scribbles over red and green, a stick-figure rider charging across a painted horse: both images trade precision for gesture, suggesting identity as movement – restless, provisional, uncontained.
Fragments of Self
As a body of work, it moves beyond religious or secular, traditional or contemporary. Instead, it becomes a visual theology – a narrative of faith and identity told through formal invention – that insists both faith and identity are processes: performed, eroded, translated, and remade. Across shifting media and form, Mal offers not simply a collection of objects but a single unfolding meditation on what it means to believe, to endure, and to belong in a world where certainty is scarce.
“While working in the quiet of the studio, I enjoy the focused time feeling into the characteristics and qualities of whoever I’m painting. This leads to participating more fully into the utter Mystery of whoever anyone is and in which all these forms are unified. Also, with street photography, I often find that there is a potential photograph to be made from everyone I pass by.
Everyone is fascinating!!
When the opportunity of this exhibition presented itself, I was intrigued but soon followed the challenge of what to include and what to leave out. Finally, I realised that to represent my work most fully, and to portray myself most inclusively and authentically, I needed to display all the mediums that I work
in. I was intrigued to see them side by side, and also alongside my mother’s works, in a way that hadn’t been explored before.”