Ayessha Quraishi
Ayessha Quraishi (born October 28, 1970) is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan. Having received her initial art training from Karachi-based educator Nayyar Jamil, she has been working for over three decades on the development of her signature technique and visual language. Her practice often integrates various media including drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and digital photography. Quraishi is a prominent artist whose work has been widely shown, both locally and internationally. She participated in the international Istanbul Biennial in 2019. More recently in 2020, Koel Gallery presented Quraishi’s major mid-career  retrospective Between Light in Karachi, featuring works spanning thirty-five years (1985-2020) of her prolific and ongoing career. Accompanying the mid-career retrospective, a comprehensive monograph was published in February 2020. Early life. Ayessha Quraishi’s early years were spent in Cornwall and Islamabad before her family settled in Karachi in 1976. At the age of seven her father passed away which had a profound effect on her as she first came to question life, from its surface of fact to subtler dimensions. The transition from the representational to abstract was a natural process that found expression in her  work from an early stage. Work. Ayessha Quraishi initiated her art career as an art teacher at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Karachi in 1988. Between 1988 and 1993, she taught children at the Art Workshop alongside designing furniture. From 1993 to 2000, Ayessha worked as a business partner and designer for the store Solo. Subsequently from 2003 to 2010, she worked in the same capacity for Karachi-based home accessories store Object. Art career. Ayessha Quraishi’s work has been exhibited widely in Pakistan and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. Publication. The Monograph Between Light was  published on the occasion of Ayessha Quraishi’s mid-career retrospective on the 4th of February 2020. It is a comprehensive volume on the work of the artist’s prolific and continuing career spanning thirty-five years from 1985 to 2020. It includes a curatorial essay by Zarmeene Shah and articles by Quddus Mirza, Maha Malik and Aasim Akhtar.