Through a meticulous process that blends painting, photography and installation, Nusra Latif Qureshi traces erased and forgotten histories to reveal the inadequacies of representation. Grounded in figuration, the artist uses imagery from the past, meaning from the present and methods from both to blur fixed identities and collapse the distance between traditionalism and contemporaneity. Small, sparing surfaces feature finely outlined silhouettes of female figures that surmise her composed tableaus. Qureshi’s depiction of the mutable human form allows her to present her own subjectivity in flux, while also explore and subvert patriarchal notions of the ideal and divine. 

Employing a research-driven process, Qureshi derives tangential imagery from colonial-era photography, botanical and anatomical painting, along with historical textile patterns to reimagine the relationship between subject and environment. Together with a concerted use of specific colours, recurrent motifs like native birds, colonial-era weaponry, entangling ropes and gestural hands hold significant allegorical and symbolic weight in her tightly controlled compositions. Traditional modalities such as family portraits and vignettes are reimagined with contemporary references to explore the politics of representation. Deeply informed by the conventional parameters of a classical artform, Qureshi continues to push the boundaries of figuration.

Born 1973 in Lahore, Pakistan, Qureshi studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore where she originally trained in the traditional art of Mughal miniature (musaviri) painting. Arriving to Australia for postgraduate study in 2001, Qureshi completed a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne, where she has lived and worked ever since. 

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions including the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, AU; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, AU; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, AU; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, US; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, US, among others. Notably, Qureshi presented Birds in Far Pavilions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2024, the artist’s first survey exhibition in a major Australian institution.

In 2019, Qureshi was awarded the prestigious Bulgari Art Award. She has received numerous international prizes and grants, while undertaking residencies in New York, US; Los Angeles, US; Banff, CA, among others. She has participated in a number of international biennial including the 15^th Sharjah Biennale (2023), the 53^rd Venice Biennale (2009) and the 5^th Asia Pacific Triennial (2006), while being included in major curated exhibitions at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, AT; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; AU; National Art Gallery, Islamabad, PK; The Drawing Center, New York, US; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, IN; the Academy of Arts, Berlin, DE and the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK, among others.