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Shahzia Sikander


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Shahzia Sikander

Pakistani, b. 1969
EDUCATION
National College of Arts Lahore in Pakistan (BFA); Rhode Island School of Design (MFA)
BIOGRAPHY

Best known for her miniature paintings, Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander takes a formal approach to traditional Indo-Persian art forms, placing emphasis on line, layering, and transformative subject matter. Her paintings are often praised for their luminosity, attention to detail, and exquisite renderings of her subjects. Born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander received a Catholic education, although she was raised in a Muslim family under the harsh regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. While she was in college at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, she studied under one of the last-remaining and renowned miniaturist painters, Sheikh Shuja Ullah. Despite her religious background, Sikander insists that her work "doesn’t deal with religion” and that the “diversity and histories of the Muslim experience is so much about its plurality. This has always been ignored.” After college, she received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Sikander then spent two years as a Core Fellow at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas. Currently, Sikander lives and works in New York, but finds the appeal of her work brings her to galleries and museums the world over.

Her most recent work takes her drawings and paintings into the digital realm of animation, where the importance of layering becomes all the more evident through movement. She has created murals, performances, and videos that relate to the recurring theme of transformation of images, marks, symbols, genres, and mediums. Sikander has executed large-scale public commissions, such as two recently-completed large commissioned works for Princeton University, an animation that was played in Times Square, and a design for MoMA's exterior hanging flags. Some of the artistic influences she cites are David Hockney, Nancy Spero, Eva Hesse, and Martha Rosler.

Mirror Plane relates to her work with mirages and the recurring visual theme of the feminine form, which she links to the female deities of Southeastern Asian religions. Sikander speaks about mirages as metaphor for the emotional process of creating art, which requires trusting that by investing in the artistic process, artists will find some truth in their work. Crown Point Press published Sikander’s portfolio of etchings, No Parking Anytime, in 2002 and two large-scale prints in 2012.

A participating artist in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, Sikander has since garnered an impressive list of both solo and group exhibitions at venues such as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the San Diego Museum of Art, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York represents Sikander. Sikander has received numerous prestigious fellowships, residencies, and awards, including a residency at Artpace in San Antonio (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2006), and the inaugural Medal of Art from the U.S. State Department (2013).



Artist Objects
Mirror Plane

2017.16.01


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