Bashir Ahmad

Bashir Ahmad is one of the most prominent contemporary miniature artists from Pakistan, and famously taught the celebrated Shahzia Sikander at the National College of Arts in Lahore. Ahmad earned a Diploma of Arts from the college in 1974, specializing in miniature painting with Sheikh Shuja-Ullah, a Mughal Court painter’s descendent. Upon graduation, he continued experimenting with the traditional and the contemporary, developing his own visual language, while preserving the motifs of Mughal and Persian art traditions.

The present work mimics the structure of a Mughal album page with intricately decorated folio borders and lace-like designs, and draws upon traditional miniature themes. An attendant (sakhi) attends to her lady (nayika) on a moonlit terrace. The full moon acts as a metaphor for the nayika’s absent lover. Its glow, along with the lady’s facial expression, reveal the presence of a lover without his depiction on the canvas. Love and longing create the atmosphere in Untitled, a beautifully detailed portrait of a lonely night.

What makes this painting a neo-miniature is its innovation in constructing the scene. The women are dressed more commonly than classical depictions of royal women, and they lack a palace structure, deviating from the conventional architectural organization of many miniature works. Spatially, the very size of the painting contemporarizes and advances the centuries-old idiom, while compositionally, the rug and gate which extend beyond the border provide a further contemporary slant on the miniature tradition.

Beyond his own artistic practice, Ahmad is known as a distinguished teacher of miniature painting. After a two-year Mughal period-style apprenticeship under hereditary court painters, Ahmad produced his own program for a degree in miniature painting within the National College of Arts in 1983. It was the first program of its kind, and it flourished. Shahzia Sikander studied miniature painting under Ahmad during her years at the school, and she carries her teacher’s spirit of creativity and imagination.