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Leading Pakistani contemporary artist, Imran Qureshi (b. Hyderabad, Pakistan, 1972) is best known for his minutely detailed paintings that borrow from the style of traditional miniatures. Trained in the celebrated ancient Mughal miniature art form, Qureshi merges the tradition with contemporary social, political and cultural subject matter to create new expressionist works. His paintings are a visual commentary on the contemporary...
Leading Pakistani contemporary artist, Imran Qureshi (b. Hyderabad, Pakistan, 1972) is best known for his minutely detailed paintings that borrow from the style of traditional miniatures. Trained in the celebrated ancient Mughal miniature art form, Qureshi merges the tradition with contemporary social, political and cultural subject matter to create new expressionist works. His paintings are a visual commentary on the contemporary realities of his homeland - modern day Pakistan.

Over his career, his work has traversed from the figurative tradition of the miniature form to a more abstract realm. In his own words, Qureshi summarizes his oeuvre as an exploration of the question, ‘What is a contemporary miniature painting?’ In this he has experimented with the possibilities of working with the traditional miniature painting using the vocabulary of a contemporary art form followed by working with single-figure compositions in miniature painting. Arriving at a conclusion that miniature painting is much more than a formal arrangement of different objects with a narrative, his recent works are more abstract, which he considers an important aspect of the traditional practice of miniature painting. More recently, he has expanded the scale of his work to create large site specific installations.

Imran Qureshi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Fine Art, National College of Arts, Lahore, where he has been teaching miniature painting since his own graduation. He has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions in Japan, India, the UK, the USA, Australia and Pakistan. Qureshi has been involved in international contemporary art surveys on South Asia, notably the exhibition East–West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran & Pakistan at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has created large scale installations in architectural spaces at the Singapore Biennial, the Asia Society Museum in New York and most recently on Cockatoo Island as part of the Biennale of Sydney 2012.

Qureshi won the Artists Prize for his site-specific installation Blessings upon the Land of My Love at the 2011 Sharjah Biennale. His works are held in the collections of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Queensland Art Galleries and Museum, Brisbane; the Harris Museum, Preston; and the National Art Gallery, Islamabad, amongst others. He is also a member of the Pakistani collective workshop Darmiyaan, set up by his wife and fellow artist Aisha Khalid to reflect on their position as artists in the wake of September 11.

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