Based between London and Pakistan, Zarina Khan employs pigment, paint and collage to create paintings depicting psychological landscapes enveloped in tones of browns and earthy reds. The female characters within her paintings are cut-out silhouettes that investigate identity, violence, gender and sexuality through the marks applied on their skins and the deep incisions between the collaged body parts that are almost buried in the thick pigment.
Born in Pakistan in 1994, she completed her BA in traditional miniature painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2018 and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of arts in 2022. She was also short-listed for the Chadwell Award in 2022. Through color, drawing and collage she creates paintings that spark associations with themes she is personally researching, patriarchy, violence, censorship and identity though pigment, bodies and psychological landscapes.
The protagonists carry these constructs within them and by cutting them out of the paper, by opening and contorting body parts, the characters origin stories are fragmented and hierarchies are destroyed, thus releasing them to become something other. Fragmentation and deconstruction is rooted in her approach, where the surface becomes a space for these pieces to be put together again as a new whole. The Brown madder color used so voraciously across her works became a pre-existing palette inspired by Pakistan's landscape that she injected with more meaning and free associating keywords. It led to a further investigation in the choice of color; color that was always an entry point into making.
