Along with its role as a centre for miniature painting, the city of Lahore itself has shaped Wardha Shabbir’s practice over many years. Trained in this highly disciplined genre, she continues to draw on its conventions while creating works that experiment formally and conceptually beyond the framework of miniature painting. Shabbir closely studies her local environment in Lahore, which features in her works alongside abstract visual fields to explore facets of identity.

Shabbir’s painting practice is distinctive in its rearrangement of the conventional picture plane in line with her unique explorations of space. This approach is closely tied to conceptual thinking about spiritual and cognitive space, and results in the artist forming new symbols of femininity and identity. Voids and empty fields juxtaposed against coloured backgrounds characterise Shabbir’s paintings and, recently, the artist has incorporated a dark entity through which she contemplates phenological energies and psychological metaphors.