Lot 1154: SHAHZIA SIKANDER

SHAHZIA SIKANDER
(Born in 1969)
ANCHOR
signed and dated 'Shazia 99' (lower right); dated and editioned 'PP 2/3' (lower left)
silkscreen on Somerest Velvet paper
71 x 88 cm. (28 x 34.5 in.)
this work is number two of three printer's proofs from an edition of sixty plus three printer's proofs
Executed in 1999

P. Antonell; J. Siegel and K. Varnedoe, Modern and Contemporary Art at MoMA Since 1980, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2000-2001, p. 498. (different edition illustrated)

Shahzia Sikander is perhaps the best known practitioner of the Neo-Miniaturist style of painting having trained in the subject at the National College of Arts in Lahore. After completing her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to New York and has since been exhibited at numerous museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, the Asia Society, and the Whitney Museum of Art. Her work is infused with elements of feminism and identity politics distilling imagery from Hindu and Islamic sources which she combines with whimsical personalized details. "Although I didn't set out with the aim to subvert, let alone reinvent, a tradition, those boundaries became blurred simply through my engagement with miniature painting, through the act of making them. I was aware that I was indulging an anachronistic practice, labor intensive, limited in the scope of its impact. But I was interested in an art form whose present was of the past I was interested in the form's cultural and historical dimensions, not simply as they relate to visual pleasure but at a more fundamental level. I was curious as to why miniature painting exists. That is where I started. But it was only after I started, not before, that the questions posed by a form that exists in the present yet is not 'contemporary' began. So the decision to engage with miniature painting was independent of the intent to blur boundaries between tradition and the avant-garde. That happened after the work existed."

(Interview between Professor Homi Bhabha and Shahzia Sikander)

Another edition of this work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.