Anwar Saeed

Anwar Saeed is a Pakistani visual artist. He was born and educated in Lahore. He graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore (1978) and completed his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London (1985). Anwar Saeed is both a prolific artist, and was an influential teacher at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore from 1986 till he retired in 2014. He is amongst the founding faculty members to set up the first of its kind printmaking studio in Pakistan at NCA, Lahore.
He works across the mediums of printmaking, drawing, painting and photography. He takes inspiration from folk and vernacular traditions of South Asia. With masterful strokes he is able to create scenes that seemingly belong to the world of magic realism. By deploying the art of storytelling, Saeed is able to comment and reflect on things that are happening around him. The layered imagery in his work is usually centred upon the male protagonist to explore themes of love, pleasure, decadence, pain, torture, societal oppression, censorship and the relationship of the self to that of religion to social and cultural values.

Anwar Saeed has exhibited widely. Most recently his work has been a part of the Karachi Biennale (2017), and Lahore Biennale (2019) in Pakistan. His important group exhibitions are Pakistan Collection, Devi Foundation, Gurgaon, India (2010), Rising Tide, Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, Pakistan (2009), Hanging Fire, Asia Society Museum, New York (2008), Desperately Seeking Paradise, Art Dubai (2006), Contemporary Printmaking from Pakistan, Swansea University, Lancaster, UK (2005), The Eye Still Seeks at the Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2001), Pakistan Another Vision, Brunei Gallery, London, UK (2000), and Cairo Biennale, Egypt (1994).

For Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Saeed has revisited a past body of photographic prints. In these pictures such as Sandow’s Act III (2012) the artist cleverly invokes the theatrics at play in the performance of masculine subjectivities as exemplified by and aptly titled picture after the German bodybuilder showman Eugen Sandow. At present, he is continuing with these investigations into masculine subjectivities and is working on two large sized paintings that are about the exploitative nature of love in a relationship that oscillates between power play and possessiveness