Shahzia Sikander

About the Artist

Shahzia Sikander was born in Pakistan in 1969. She studied Mughal miniature painting under a traditional master at the National College of Arts in Lahore, and later attended the Rhode Island School of Art and Design. She has lived in the United States for almost a decade, and presently resides in New York City.

From her earliest paintings, stylistically Sikander has mixed Mughal (Islamic) and Rajput (Hindu) traditional forms. Since she has been living in the United States she has also received inspiration from what she calls "mundane and ordinary things" and often there is an element of humor underlying her work.

She has said that "art is a ticket to experience." She sees boundaries in life that will "always exist" and lists them as "economic, cultural, national, religious, political, geographical, historical, and psychological."

What she wants to do, as an artist, is to "articulate their shifting nature."

Besides her work with miniature paintings, she has also done a number of large wall paintings and installations that involve drawings done with whole-body gestural movements. Her installations, in particular, use layers of large drawings and often are put up in just a few days. They are a foil for her detailed miniature paintings that require months, sometimes years, to complete.

In making her prints, which fit in-between her paintings andher installations, she often begins with images she has developed in other media, and she has used a computer to manipulate some of these images.

She then develops the images further by adding a great deal of direct drawing on the plates, working in a very detailed and concentrated fashion using traditional printmaking processes.

"Using digital technology for me is not very different from how I have worked in the past," she says. "I have always culled information and images from a range of sources (art historical or personal) and played it out through layers. I am doing the same here, except I am further complicating the layering process through digitally altering my drawings."