Prem Sahib: Liquid Gold
27 February – 1 April 2026
The Perimeter is pleased to announce Liquid Gold by Prem Sahib. On view from sunset to sunrise, this site-specific installation marks the second exhibition held at The Blue Lion pub.
In title and form, Prem Sahib’s roaming work Liquid Gold (2016 – ongoing) is suggestive of substances deemed both precious and worthless, raising questions around the fluidity or tangibility of value, and the malleability of the forms in which value is held. The title simultaneously refers to precious metals in states of material flux, bodily effluence, and a popular brand of poppers, forming a web of associations that hint at alchemical processes of transformation and transcendence.
The work has its roots in the installation spinnin’ lil white lies about his crepuscular time in yellow (2013), presented at the White Cubicle at The George & Dragon pub, a queer venue on Hackney Road in east London. Here, Sahib employed yellow lighting and a frosted shower door that invited viewers inside, offering the light as a proxy for the substances circulating within the space. For the first time since this event, Liquid Gold returns to a former social space, The Blue Lion, rendering the interior of the pub static and staged, as if a theatrical set.
Since its first iteration in 2013, Liquid Gold has been exhibited at Grand Union, Birmingham (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2021); Phillida Reid, London (2022); the 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Göteborg (2023); Edinburgh Arts Festival (2024) and Pitzhanger Manor, London (2025).
Acting as a beacon and an elusive occupier of space, Liquid Gold’s codified use of colour turns its site into a vessel and expands, like a fluid, to fill – or overspill – its proportions. The light acts as an unruly substance, leaking beyond windows to pool on the street, positioning the viewer outside of the vessel in which it is held. Working within the conditions of night, like nocturnal sunlight, beyond usual opening hours, the work becomes an inversion of the typical gallery and museum model of audience engagement: re-casting its viewers as outsiders, looking in.
The work of Prem Sahib (b. London, UK. Lives and works in London) embodies a poetic and provocative “destabilised minimalism”, referencing the architecture of public and private spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement. Mixing the personal and political, abstraction and figuration, Sahib’s formalism is suggestive of the body as well as its absence, drawing attention to traces of touch and frameworks of looking.
As recipient of the Royal Academy of Arts Frampton Fund for Sculpture, Sahib’s commission, Bronze Apotropaic (2025), is currently presented at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, Ealing, London. In 2026, a new permanent public commission will be unveiled in the London borough of Southall. Solo exhibitions include Doubles, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2025); Documents of a recent past, Studio Voltaire, London (2025); The Life Cycle of a Flea, Phillida Reid, London (2023); presentations within forms of the surrounding futures, the 12th Göteborg Biennial for Contemporary Art, curated by João Laia (2023); Balconies, Kunstverein Hamburg (2017); and Side On, ICA London (2015). Alleus, a live performance work co-commissioned by Somerset House Studios and The Roberts Institute of Art, was performed in 2024 at Somerset House, and toured to the Edinburgh Art Festival. Their work has been included in group presentations at Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Italy; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Migros Museum, Zürich, Switzerland; Whitechapel Gallery; Hayward Gallery, London; KW Institute of Art, Berlin, Germany; Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa, USA; and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, among others. That Fire Over There, an artist’s book developed from Descent, Sahib’s three-part show of 2020-21, was published in summer 2023 by Book Works, London.
Their work is in the collections of Tate, The Arts Council, Government Art Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway; X Museum, Beijing, China; and MONA, Australia.
For press enquiries or images, please contact Fabian Strobel Lall: fabian@strobellall.com
The Blue Lion
133 Gray’s Inn Rd. &
17 - 19 Brownlow Mews
London, WC1N 2LE
On view from sunset to sunrise