Maha Ahmed Qureshi born in 1989, lives & works in Dubai, completed her Master of Fine Arts at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, London on the Caspian Art Foundation Scholarship (2015) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Miniature Painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore (2012). Drawing on feelings of isolation and wonder, Ahmed’s intricate, otherworldly visions of fantastical creatures and distant worlds offer a poignant refection on her personal feelings of unfamiliarity during a period of living and working in Tokyo.

His artistic style lies in the de-construction of identity, the self-positioning within a cultural context and society’s reactions to the individual. Ahmed draws inspiration from Persian and Mughal manuscripts and from the tradition of Japanese landscape painting with its contemplative, meditative compositions of water, plants, rocks and animals. In her works, Ahmed places hybrid creatures into imagined utopian landscapes. Her subjects subtly inhabit spaces that are not dominated by humans but reserved instead for the unfolding of dreams, for imaginings and for emotions. Her paintings can be read as documents of identity construction, cross-cultural experiences and transformative events that occurred in the artists’ personal life.