Young Professional Qinza Najm

My painting explores the relationship between storytelling and identity with allusions to metaphysics, symbolism, and spirituality. Personal memories, stories from history, mystical dreams, and aspirations are realized through vivid colors, gestural marks, and semi-figurative representations to give them new meanings in relation to humanity and dilemmas of our time. My art is an amalgam of ideas, materials, and thought processes. As a Pakistani-American artist, my bicultural identity informs the conception and fulfillment of my work. My inspiration comes from multiple sources, including Rumi, Ghalib, Picasso, and Shakespeare. An interplay of Eastern and Western artistic traditions is reflected in my drawings and collages. I incorporate symbolic forms derived from Renaissance and Mughal art as well as Ottoman architectural motifs, which serve as personal lexicons of an emotional, psychological, and spiritual state of flux in my unwavering search for enlightenment. My work challenges mutual stereotypes between Americans and Pakistanis and mixes Eastern and Western religious philosophies to affirm the power of seeing others with compassion and through a spirituality that resides within the self. My forthcoming multimedia art project will engage audience participation to further cultivate open-minded crosscultural dialogue between East and West. Using mixed media on large scale canvas—such as glaze, ink, acrylic, oil, pastel, roller, palette knife, and brushes of various sizes— , my work process (tedious and sometimes serendipitous) involves transformations that give a second life to found elements and visions that I encounter in my everyday. Qinza Najm is a Pakistani-American artist whose work has been selected for many national and international juried exhibitions. Currently Najm's large-scale work is held in several prestigious public and private art collections. She has exhibited at Dubai's Christie’s Art, NYC Saffron Art, Sikka Art Fair, and U.S. Consulate as well as at New York's Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, Coohaus Art Gallery, the Governors Island Art Fair, and Times Square. Najm’s mixed media work Sacred Sinister was selected to lead off a recent charity auction “Contemporary Pakistani Art Now” held at Christie’s, Dubai. The work sold at double its list value, and the auction raised a total $1.5 million for the United Nations' World Food Program in Pakistan. Najm completed her psychology Ph.D. in the United States, which enables her to explore her subconscious and bring it onto the canvas. She pursued her fine arts studies at Bath University, the Savannah School of Art & Design, and The Art Students League of New York, where she studied with well known artists like Bruce Dorfman, Ronnie Landfield, Leonid Lerman, and Larry Poons. Her art embodies the state of inhabiting two worlds, staying true to her traditional Pakistani roots while navigating life based in New York City.