Waqas Khan (*1982 in Akhtarabad, Pakistan)
The focus of Waqas Khan’s practice lies in forging an emotional and spiritual connection with the viewer.
“I want the viewer to actually look at the works and through my work I want to evoke a dialogue between the viewer and the work. It’s all about assimilating from outside to inside and letting the outside image enter inside you.”
Each work unfolds as a visual narrative that invites contemplation rather than passive observation. Meticulously composed of millions of tiny dots, lines, and strokes, Khan’s drawings are created using a wooden dowel traditionally employed by architects for technical drafting. Through this painstaking process, meditative surfaces emerge that reveal extraordinary precision and patience.
Encountering Khan’s oeuvre is to experience an artistic language that is both powerful and subtle. His drawings reflect a profound awareness of time, existence, and the human desire to leave a trace within the shared space of life. While often associated with Minimalism, his work departs from the movement’s industrial and serial aesthetics. Instead, his compositions are built from countless individual marks that form organic rhythms, pauses, and patterns—repetitive yet never identical.
Created in the solitude and silence of the artist’s studio, these intricate visual structures become expressions of thought, emotion, and intuition. Khan’s rhythmic constellations evolve into expansive, almost cartographic fields that invite viewers into an active dialogue, encouraging personal reflection and an intimate encounter with the work itself.
Waqas Khan studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. This year, he received the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz award from the Government of Pakistan. In 2018, he was awarded the NDTV Spectrum Award for Transformation in Visual Arts in Southeast Asia and the ACTA Award in Arts. In 2013, he was nominated for the Jameel Prize.
His recent exhibitions include Take Up, Take a Breath at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated by Mary Cremin; In the Night at the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art; and Fear Nothing She Says at the National Museum of Sculpture, curated by Rosa MartÃnez.
A selection of solo and group exhibitions includes: Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2013); Drawingroom, curated by Peter Weiermair, Ursula Blickle Foundation, Vienna (2013); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria (2014); Jameel Prize 3, Hermitage Kazan Museum, Kazan, Russia (2014); Menge Museum, Moscow, Russia (2014); NTU Singapore, Singapore (2014); Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, Sharjah (2015); Museu Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, Spain (2015); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2016); Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2016); Villa Empain, Fondation Boghossian, Brussels, Belgium (2016); the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2017); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2017); Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2017); Lahore Biennale 01, Lahore, Pakistan (2018); Beijing Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2019); Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France (2020); and Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, Spain (2020).
His last solo exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger was HISTORY, MEMORY OR GEOMETRY in 2018.
