Heritage & Legacy
Passionately committed to exploring the inherent properties, color, and luminosity of form, United States-based artist Maira Abbasi creates work that moves seamlessly between many approaches. Maira's striking paintings draw us into an enigmatic, transformative, exotic, and sensual world of fantasy, seduction, and spirit. Color and form undulate in fluid compositions that form an interior dialogue on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture, and history. Her works emphasize the theme of a journey that is at once historically embedded and yet intensely personal. The Pakistani-born artist is a painter whose style, techniques, and subjectivity are both vast and diverse, yet always grounded in the internal psychology of places, history, and nature, and her physical responses to the materials in articulating the unsaid.
Her primary focus and area of work is a unique approach to painting, utilizing signature mixed media methods. Creating both intuitively and instinctively, she infuses her work with a spirit of harmony and balance that is then juxtaposed with a hypnotic edge. In Maira’s Architecture Series, her own personal history, relationships, and experiences clearly influence her paintings as she documents the glory, strength, and fragility of space and time. By recording those stories and experiences visually in her work, she gives them significance, acknowledging their beauty, melancholy, and history. She does so by layering colors that create a duality of razor-sharp and soft textures that coexist alongside the colorful blending of representation with gestural expressionism. This reveals her physical involvement in the work - paint has been applied with passion, leaving behind a veritable artistic signature as a testimony for her viewer.
NUR MAHAL (Palace of Lights) was built in 1872. The Abbasi Palace for guests.
DARBAR MAHAL (Palace of the Court), built in 1905, Abbasi Palace
Drawing inspiration directly from her own personal history, Maira’s art is directly impacted by the prodigious legacy left behind by her own family and the tragedy that lies behind the fall of great dynasties. Maira's grandfather was the descendent and last Amir of the Abbasid Caliphate, 750 CE. The Golden Age of Learning, literature and art. During the time of Caliph Harun Ul Rashid ABBASI, the famed One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) was compiled. The artist's travels to the magnificent ABBASI palaces and the Derawar Fort in the heart of the mystical Cholistan desert steeped in history and Sufism have enormously impacted and influenced her work to this day.
Maira Abbasi's Grandfather: The late Nawab Sir Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi V
Maira Abbasi's Great-Grandfather: H. H. Bahawal Khan Abbasi 1883-1907
Maira Abbasi's Great-Great-Grandfather: H. H. Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV
Echoing Warhol’s ideology that “The idea is not to live forever but to create something that will,” Maira explains that with her own works, she wants "the audience to find something new each time, "poignantly noting, "I create each piece as though it were my last.”