Mona Chalabi's work is a compelling mix of illustration with a journalistic work ethic and a rigorous approach to statistics. The science and art worlds could do with more of this "TMI Queen"

Mona Chalabi makes communicating science and social problems easy and entertaining

Artist, illustrator and journalist Mona Chalabi describes herself as the “TMI QUEEN.” If you’re unaware of her “too much information” style, at her first private view at the Zari Gallery in London earlier in May, the first thing you saw was a making-of video for her 2016 artwork about pubic hair grooming injuries.

A blitz of Photoshop work that flies by in a few minutes, the time-lapse video shows how she took a clinical and explicit journal entry picture and turned it into a colourful and eye-catching graphic with bright colours, elegant cursive titles and a scientifically accurate heatmap of the most common places where people injure themselves when they groom their pubic hair. Here’s the link to Mona’s story that accompanies the graphic if you want to learn more.

Guardian readers and her 133,000 followers on Instagram will be used to enjoying Chalabi’s in-your-face illustrations, but this isn’t the kind of thing you will usually see at a West London gallery. “Who Are You Here To See?” was mostly dedicated to a retrospective of her illustrative work published in the Guardian and on her Instagram account between 2014 and 2019, but like most of her witty graphics about topics as diverse as the pay gap, endangered species or the rarity of redheads, this opening party had a point. Visit a major art gallery, and you probably won’t encounter work from people like Chalabi. That’s to say, a woman. Or a person of an ethnic background that’s not white.

Chalabi’s main artwork at “Who Are You Here To See?” shows the 88 out of 100 artists in major US museums who are men.

To reflect this, Chalabi created an artwork especially for the event. As her caption says, “If all the artists in major US museums were represented by 100 people, 88 of them would be men.” To show this stark fact, she beautifully illustrated this with a huge canvas showing a typical art space filled with those 88 men and 12 women artists. Behind this on the same canvas, it showed what the art world might look like if it represented reality. As you might expect, it’s a very different picture.


The completed artwork shows the artists that are missing from major US galleries, and what the room would look like if they represented the true US population.

On another wall Chalabi created a “drip painting” showing the dire historical record of the Tate galleries in representing work by women. Since 2014, things have improved, but there’s still a long way to go. This work, a “painting about the Tate’s paintings” was based on a study by Martin Bellander who analysed thousands of artworks to show that the Tate still has 5.5 men for every 1 woman in their collection.

The “Drip Painting” shows the gender of all artists in the Tate’s permanent collection by their date of birth and gender. The emergence of women, shown in blue, is happening slowly. Emily-Jayne Nolan

Chalabi’s work is compelling not just because she combines a journalistic work ethic with illustrative and artistic techniques. It’s also because underpinning it all is a rigorous approach to statistics, and a fearless campaigning style. Where else in the art world can you encounter artists who employ fact checkers?

There’s also a lot that scientists can learn from her approachable and understandable graphics. There’s no reason that the Jama Dermatology journal, which was the basis of her excellent pubic injuries illustration, shouldn’t or couldn’t employ Mona, or someone like her, to communicate its findings. In our opinion, the world’s not even close to getting too much of this TMI Queen.

“Who Are You Here To See?” was on display at the Zari Gallery. Follow Mona Chalabi on Instagram for more of her work