Imran Qureshi at Salsali Private Museum

Deutsche Bank in cooperation with Salsali Private Museum will be exhibiting the work of Imran Qureshi, Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2013, in Dubai from 24 January to 28 February 2014. Like its corporate collection, Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” award is committed to the present. The aim is to acquaint a wide public with new and exciting artistic positions. Every year, based on the recommendation of Deutsche Bank’s Global Art Advisory Council, the bank honors one promising international artist.

Qureshi’s art is both a reference to tradition and a vehicle for criticism. He delves into the constant alternation between violence and hope, destruction and creation, and calls for optimism and peaceful resistance against violence and intolerance in difficult times.

Trained in miniature paintings, Imran Qureshi is one of the most important figures in Pakistan’s art scene today. The 1972 born artist works from the motifs, symbolism and ornaments of the Mogul tradition that flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries in the north of the Indian subcontinent. He utilizes old Islamic forms of art and expands them in his miniatures, paintings as well as installations to become contemporary means of expression.

Unlike many other prizes, “Artist of the Year” is not based on a financial reward, but is positioned as an integral part of the Deutsche Bank art program, which has been opening up the world of contemporary art to the public for the last thirty years. Each “Artist of the Year” is presented in a solo exhibition at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin; subsequently, the exhibitions move on to other international locations around the world, and Dubai has been chosen to be part of the exhibition tour for 2014.

Born 1972 in Pakistan, Imran Qureshi studied in Lahore at the National College of Arts with a major in miniature painting — a traditional discipline that he teaches there today. Qureshi is considered to be one of the most important contemporary artists on the Subcontinent, not least because he reclaims the regionally and historically rooted discipline of miniature painting and transports it to the present day. His work constitutes a unique synthesis of the genre’s motifs and techniques with current issues and the formal language of contemporary abstract painting. In his work, the exploration of ornament is both a return to tradition and a commentary on the present day. The artist converts miniature painting into site-specific installations that address architectural space. Works such as Blessings Upon the Land of My Love, 2011 (Sharjah Biennale) or They Shimmer Still, 2012 (Biennale of Sydney) harbor references to the historical or political meaning of the respective buildings.