Episode 59

Episode 59 features Hiba Schahbaz. Born in Karachi, Pakistan she is a Brooklyn-based figurative painter who works primarily with paper, black-tea, and water-based pigments. Her subjects, largely drawn from her lifelong practice of self-portraiture, inhabit a dreamlike, all-female world. Schahbaz initially trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting at Lahore’s National College of Arts, and later earned a Master’s in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York. Her work addresses issues of personal freedom, destruction, sexuality and censorship by unveiling the beauty, fragility and strength of the female form. Her solo shows include Dreaming (De Buck Gallery 2020) In Solitude (De Buck Gallery, 2020), The Garden (Spring/ Break Art Show, 2018), Hiba Schahbaz: Self-Portraits (Project for Empty Space, 2017), Hanged With Roses (Thierry Goldberg Gallery, 2015), and In Memory (Noire Gallery, 2012). Schahbaz has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including a recent show curated by Jasmine Wahi in Tokyo, “all the women. in me. are tired.”, at THE CLUB, as well as exhibitions at NiU Museum of Art, The Untitled Space, and Center for Book Arts; and has shown at art fairs such as Pulse Art Fair, Untitled Art Fair, Art Fair Cologne, and Vienna Fair. Her work has been written about in Vice, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, Coveteur, Vogue, NY Magazine, Art Critical, ArtForum, Bomb Mag, Paper, and others. Schahbaz has curated painting exhibitions in Pakistan and India, and she was an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, The Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, and the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at the Tang Museum. She teaches miniature painting at the Art Students League in New York, and her work is held in private collections around the world. —adapted from De Buck Gallery press release, 2020

‘In My Heart’. Rockefeller Center. Art Production Fund. Thru May 1st, 2021

Headshot credit: Louise Kim_Edited