Fiza Khatri

Fiza Khatri is a Pakistani artist based in the United States, whose works intertwine lived experience and cultural history with great intricacy. In their oeuvre, lush nature, wildlife and humans cohabit, the latter often represented in moments of intimacy or contemplation.

Depicting emotionally imbued everyday objects and situations, their paintings offer their subjects visibility within a benevolent universe. The pictorial space encompasses a terrain of social ecology that emphasizes the links between the intimate and the political, celebrating the vibrant interweaving of living things.

Drawing inspiration from the romantic style of precious Rājput miniatures, Khatri eliminates perspective, lending greater importance to the continuity between background and foreground. In their painting, Khatri often combines the use of an airbrush—to obtain a blurred effect that evokes optical distortion—and oil paint, which allows extreme precision alongside the impression of a sketch that has been captured with rapid brushstrokes.

Fiza Khatri was born in Karachi (Pakistan) in 1992 and currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut (USA). In 2023, they graduated from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking. Khatri’s works have been exhibited in Asia, North America and in the UK by galleries such as Jhaveri Contemporary, Perrotin, Grimm and Micki Meng and they will be taking part in the forthcoming Lahore Biennale. While living in Pakistan, Khatri was engaged with curating and organising in relation to feminist and queer communities.