Seher Shah’s work is formed by the intersection between drawing and architecture. Shah uses public and private spaces for a narrative interior dialogue of memory and nostalgia. Her detailed drawings and prints merge diverse iconographies, architectural, historical, personal and political. Through her thoughtful and innovative draftsmanship and compositional style, histories of the various cultures, languages and religions that embed her are the building blocks and landscapes. Shah works with the impermanence and the transformation, which is deconstructed and reconstructed, nothing is absolute and everything changes through time. Her drawings are the stage for a theatrical spectacle of exploration and the construction of cosmopolitan identities.
Read MoreBorn in 1975 in Karachi, Pakistan, Seher Shah grew up in Belgium, the U.K, and New York City. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture Degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Over the past years her work has appeared in several international exhibitions including Zeichnungen at Gisele Linder Gallery, Basel; Generation 1.5 at The Queens Museum of Art; 21: Twenty-First Century Artists at The Brooklyn Museum; FIAC at the Cour Carrée, Louvre in Paris; The Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Drawing Space at Green Cardamom, London.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Asia Pacific, Bidoun, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, and Frieze Magazine, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum and The Queens Museum in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Schauffhausen, Switzerland; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt; the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Vienna, amongst others.
Seher Shah currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Recent solo exhibitions include 30 | 60 | 90 at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2013); Constructed Landscapes at AMOA- Art House, The Jones Center, Austin TX (2013), Radiant Lines, Nature Morte, Berlin (2012); and Brute Ornament, two-persons exhibition with Kamrooz Aram at Green Art Galler, Dubai (2012). Selected group show include Observed Ratios, The James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center, New York (2013); Decenter: An exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show at the Abrons Art Center, New York, NY (2013); Radical Terrain at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY (2012); Lines of Control at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, New York, NY (2012); Drawing 2011: Biennial, at the Drawing Room, London, UK (2011); Eccentric Architecture and Generation 1.5 at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY (2011); On Rage at the Haus der Kulteren der Welt, Berlin (2010); 21: Selections of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY (2008).
