The next Artist You Need To Know is Mala Iqbal.
Iqbal is an artist who focuses primarily on paintings and drawings and has worked in both oil and acrylic. She also has “a very robust sketchbook practice, which is a kind of engine for my brain and eyes and hands. I also do a lot of collaborative work.”
Born in 1973 in the Bronx, Iqbal was raised in a household that encompassed several languages and cultures and this has informed her approach to artmaking, especially in terms of her depictions of people and the environments within which they live and act.
“I’m interested in narrative and stories. I’ve always been an avid reader of literature and fiction—books with plot and characters. For me, stories are a way of understanding the world around me—understanding history better, understanding other people, other cultures. I think painting does that, too, in a different sort of way. My paintings are generally sort of ambiguous stories. They’re not very spelled out narratives. You can look at them and different things could be suggested to different people. And I like that.”
She earned a BA (Visual Arts and English) from Columbia University (NYC) in 1995 and then an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design three years later.
Growing up, Iqbal says she was a “slightly withdrawn, awkward kid” who loved reading and drawing. Now, her hometown of New York City is her muse, and she takes inspiration for her work from the people around her. “I’m one of those people on the subway and the bus who is always drawing my fellow New Yorkers,” she says. (from here)
“Watching people and looking deeply is something that I feel like I’ve done all my life. I think that partly comes from my personal background and how I grew up. I had two parents from very different cultures. There were multiple languages being spoken, and not everyone understood everyone’s language. I was often helping my mother, who was German, to understand what my aunts and uncles were talking about when they slipped into Punjabi, or when my grandmother was trying to tell a story to me in a mixture of English and Urdu. I was always filling in the blanks.” (from the Joan Mitchell Foundation)
Significant solo showings of her work have taken place at Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn; Ulterior Gallery, Bellwether Gallery, and PPOW in New York; Taylor University in Upland, Indiana; Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia; and Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. Iqbal has also collaborated with the artist Angela Dufresne and these artworks were on view at Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery, SUNY Purchase, and LSU in Baton Rouge.
She has exhibited extensively in group shows throughout the United States as well as internationally (notably in Australia, China, Europe, and India). A number of publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker have also featured Iqbal’s artworks.
Iqbal has been awarded artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship in Painting in 2008. She was also awarded a prestigious Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2023.
A more comprehensive listing of her many accomplishments can be seen here.
“Belonging and not belonging is something I have negotiated since childhood as a lesbian first-generation American with immigrant parents from very different geographies and cultural/religious backgrounds. My sketchbooks mix observational drawings and invented scenes—allowing me to place metaphysical, at times outright mannerist exaggerations of bodies and gestures right next to realisms. My paintings depict scenarios where the weirdos are the heroes or where anyone would be vulnerable—in loneliness, in awkward positions, asleep on the bus.”
Mala Iqbal lives and works in New York City.
Iqbal has an extensive site and you can explore much more of her work there, including links to several fine articles about her work and her own writings about her practice.