Zumi Rash
Between two worlds
Born in Tashkent. Shaped by tradition. Transformed by solitude — and the questions that live at the edge of consciousness.
Born into paint —
a house of artists
Zumi Rash was born on 5 April 1991 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, into a household where paint-stained hands were simply part of daily life. Both her parents were accomplished painters — a rare inheritance that shaped the way she learned to see the world long before she ever touched a brush. Art was not something she discovered. It was something she was born into.
From early childhood, she moved naturally between literature, music, and visual art — drawn equally to word and image, to sound and silence. By the age of twelve, she had stretched her first canvas. In 2007, that beginning took shape when she began studying under her first formal mentor, Anvar Alimdzhanovich Mamadzhanov, gaining a deeper and more rigorous command of the craft.
In 2008, she passed the entrance examinations to the Republican Art College named after P.P. Benkov, where she joined the painting group of Mirzakhmedov Khakim Karimovich. Alongside her studio practice, she pursued the intellectual foundations of her discipline — studying the history and theory of fine art from 2009 to 2011.
Her academic path was one of sustained commitment. In 2014 she was awarded a Bachelor's degree in Fine and Applied Arts, followed two years later by a Master's degree from the National Institute of Arts and Design — a thorough formation that gave her both the technical mastery and the critical vocabulary to develop a practice entirely her own.
In 2019, she relocated to the Netherlands, where — supported by her partner, the musician Lars Nelissen van Gasselt — she began an ambitious new body of work that would become the series Papillon. It is here that her vision fully crystallised. Drawn to the boundless dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí and the raw gestural force of Jackson Pollock, Rash seeks the point where their worlds converge — a synthesis of surrealism and abstraction that is unmistakably, irreducibly her own.
A rigorous academic journey
Painting the threshold
Zumi Rash paints what most people can only sense — the invisible boundary between the known and the unknowable. Her work is rooted in the concept of the bardo: the moribund moment, that brief and disorienting threshold between life and death, where consciousness unravels and something entirely else begins.
Her paintings do not illustrate ideas. They enact them. Dark, layered, charged with unresolved tension, they pull the viewer toward something they cannot quite name — and hold them there, suspended between recognition and mystery.
"I paint the short, unclear moment between death and life — questioning what happens to our consciousness and subconsciousness during this phase of transformation. It is not a place. It is a feeling most people have sensed, but never seen."
From Tashkent to Kessel —
finding the dark
After completing her Master's degree, Zumi Rash joined the faculty of the National Institute of Arts and Design as a professor — teaching the very discipline she had devoted years to mastering. But life, as it often does, arrived with other plans.
In 2019, she followed love across a continent. Her husband — a Dutch pianist — brought her to the Netherlands, and with that move came a quiet rupture that would reshape everything. Far from family, from the familiar textures of Tashkent, and from the students who had known her work, she found herself alone with her thoughts — and her brushes.
That solitude was not emptiness. It was the beginning of something darker, stranger, and entirely her own.
With her husband's unwavering support, she began to paint in a way she had never quite allowed herself before. The dark, surrealistic vision she had always carried quietly inside finally broke through — rawer, more personal, less explained. She stopped painting what she could see and began painting what she could barely articulate.
Today, Zumi Rash lives and works in the village of Kessel, in the southern Netherlands — a quiet, unhurried place that suits the slow, searching nature of her work. Each canvas is a conversation with the unknown: deliberate, unflinching, and open-ended.
Recognition &
exhibitions
From an international competition victory at seventeen, to a self-curated live exhibition that opened her work to the world — a practice built on intention, not imitation.
View Gallery→Papillon — Online Live Art Exhibition
Self-curated virtual exhibition · Launched 17 May 2024
A meditative journey through the bardo, rendered in paint and light
1st Prize — International Art Competition
Slovak Republic 14th National Thematic Art Competition
"Why I Like the World" · Bratislava, June 2008
Special certificate & art grant awarded
Curriculum
Vitae
Full academic and professional record of Zumi Rash, available for galleries, institutions, and collector inquiries.
Basic Information
Education
National Institute of Arts and Design, Uzbekistan
National University of Uzbekistan
Republican Art College P.P. Benkov, Uzbekistan
Exhibitions & Awards
"Why I Like the World", Bratislava, Slovak Republic