Faiza Butt - Emerging Pakistani Artists

Faiza Butt’s practice is engaged with two simultaneous concerns: one narrative and the other formal. The narrative derives from everyday imagery of life around her: journalistic photographs of celebrities from the print media, the to random acts of violence relayed regularly by the electronic media. At a formal level, Butt has developed a distinctly anti-painterly approach to painting: a critical position in opposition to the overt masculinity of the medium as ascribed to the New York school painters. She uses felt tip pens to recreate images in tiny dots on architect’s film—a direct reference to the par-dokht application of paint in Indo-Persian miniature painting. On these carefully drawn surfaces she then often splatters paint—a mocking of the abstract painting cliché.

Faiza Butt graduated with Honours in Painting at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore in 1993, and received a Distinction in her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London in 1999. Her work has been exhibited in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa, USA, Finland and the UK. She has been awarded residencies and scholarships in South Africa and the UK. Faiza Butt lives and works in London.