Mahbub Shah

Mahbub Shah was born near Ranipur in Sindh, Pakistan. He studied painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore and graduated with the degree Bachelor of Fine Arts (2001). At present, Mahbub teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Design at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

Mahbub works across the fields of visual art, art education and translation. His works can be described as a series of iconoclastic interventions responding to the dominant visual culture as a persistently pervasive phenomenon seeking to occupy public gaze and imagination. These works such as the set Untitled (2006) for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, re-image selected (usually found) images, icons, objects and texts as visual metaphors that invite to be re-viewed as ideological constructs and thus as contested representations. In other words, these works re- present familiarised representations in a critical and satirical manner. The artist describes these Untitled paintings as attempts to visualise poetic images/texts amidst virtual omnipresence of prosaic flat images/texts of contemporary digitised age, commodified and categorised, tainting contemporary social experience and fields of vision. It seeks to enact an interactive and creative correspondence with the potential viewer/reader.

Mahbub Shah’s recent solo and group exhibitions include Adjective/Verb, Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi (2021), After Images, Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi (2019), Cross-overs, Al-Hamra Art Gallery, Lahore (2019), In the Beginning Was the Word, O Space, Lahore and Invitation to Action, Lahore Biennale (2018), Paper, Picture, Perfect, Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2017), Crossing Over: Contemporary art from Pakistan, Gallery Latitude 28, New Delhi (2013), Considering Collage, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2013), Resemble Reassemble, Devi Foundation, New Delhi (2010), Pattern Recognition, The City Gallery, Leicester (2009), Moment as Monument, Thomas Erben at Travancore Palace, New Delhi (2009), Good Looking: Vision and Society in contemporary art, Grey Noise, Lahore/Dubai (2009), Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben in collaboration with Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai (2008), Green Cardamom at Hong Kong Art Fair (now Art Basel, HK) (2008), Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, Punctured and Unravelled, Green Cardamom Gallery, London (2007), Face of the Artist: Self Portraits of our times, Rothas_2 Gallery, Lahore and Out of the Box, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq Gallery, National College of Arts, Lahore (2005).

For the past many years Mahbub Shah has been working on his forthcoming translation of eighteenth- century poet Waris Shah’s epic Hir from Punjabi into Sindhi. He lives and works in Lahore.