Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition of work by artist Aqsa Shakil. Dallas based Shakil will show a recent selection of paintings on paper, marking the artist’s first show in New York City.

In her paintings Shakil combines the natural elements of rain or snow fall with a meticulous rendering of human figures, Islamic geometric patterns and Indian miniature details. Shakil works with elements of nature, the movement of her own body and images of familial history to render and record memory.

In the words of the artist: “My work is heavily influenced by travel. Having been rooted, un-rooted and re-rooted from Tanzania, to Pakistan, to Dallas, I have a constant inherent obsession of wanting to trace every slipping moment. My paintings have remnants of old photographs of people I have known, grown out of, or run into over the years. They are submerged in memory pockets: vast atmospheric spaces, which result after the paper endures a rain or snow storm. The random splatters of precipitation have a strange orderly pattern, and I intervene with my orderly splatters that have a strange randomness. The dichotomy of the two makes an exact visual depiction of what I think memory looks like.”

Aqsa Shakil was born in Tanzania and raised in Pakistan. She has been living and working in Dallas Texas since 2002 and received her MFA from Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in 2007.