Hiba Schahbaz, Night Garden, 2024; Original Painting

**These original works are available via private sale only. Please email hello@artforchange.com with your interest. 

Hiba Schahbaz’s figurative work unveils the beauty, fragility, and strength of the female form, as a way of addressing issues of personal freedom, destruction, sexuality, and censorship. Born in Karachi, Pakistan and based in Brooklyn, the artist uses black tea and water-based pigments to portray subjects—largely drawn from her lifelong practice of self-portraiture—who inhabit a dreamlike, all-female world. Schahbaz initially trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting at Lahore’s National College of Arts, before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Almine Rech, Paris, France; DeBuck Gallery, New York, NY; and New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Additionally, she unveiled a public installation at Rockefeller Center in New York, presented by Art Production Fund in 2021.

Hiba Schahbaz
Night Garden, 2024
Gouache, watercolor, tea, and gold leaf on wasli
12.5 x 10 inches

Rendered in the artist’s signature style which replicates traditional illustration books and illuminated manuscripts, the three works selected by Schahbaz amplify the artist’s affinity towards themes pertaining to nature. Bathing under a Full Moon and Night Garden (both 2024) depict nocturnal scenes each illuminated by a full moon, rendered in gold leaf and seen shining in a dark blue sky. These works are painted on handmade paper called wasli, which is burnished with a cowry shell before use to make its surface smooth. The third painting, Self-Portrait (with leaves) (2023) situates the artist—gazing outwards as her hair swirls and frames her face—at the center of a tondo distinguished by the green contours of foliage.

With environmental conservation a central tenet of ART FOR CHANGE’s mission, the artists invited for this exhibition confront and contribute to the move toward sustainability by exploring nature and the environment through content, methods, inspiration, or process. In conjunction with the exhibition, ART FOR CHANGE and Phillips will plant 1,000 trees to help counter the CO2 emissions produced by the art industry.

For this collaboration between Phillips and ART FOR CHANGE, Schahbaz notes, “Almost all of my paintings depict a relationship between humans, animals, nature, and spirit.”