Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Mala Iqbal

Mala Iqbal

Brooklyn, New York

“Dog Baby” is an expressionist figurative painting centered on a woman with dark long hair and skin rendered in pinks, grays and purple, holding a thin greenish baby with a dog face against her bright blue and orange flecked shirt. Behind her are three figures with their faces closely crowded around her shoulders, rendered in greens, blues and peaches. Behind all of them is abstracted bright green vegetation.

Dog Baby

2023

“Young Father” is an figurative painting centered on a mustachioed man with dark hair and medium dark skin sitting cross legged on a white and red blanket in a park, eyes cast down to an orange book titled “Neurochem”. He wears a brown sweater vest over a light striped shirt, and a bright green scarf is gathered around his neck. His white dress shoes sit to the side, and a trench coat lies over his lap.

Young Father

2022

“My Mother's Funeral” is an expressionist figurative painting, in which a woman with medium light skin, brown hair, glasses and pink patterned shirt at left, kneels above a dead woman wrapped in green and red fabric strips. Above the dead woman, a ghostly transparent nude figure floats above, folded at the waist. To the right, a man with medium dark skin in a blue suit looks down sadly at the body. Behind them is a green grassy cemetery, and two men and a woman with medium dark skin huddle together in the distance looking towards the funeral scene.

My Mother's Funeral

2022

“Leftover Party Witch” is a figurative painting focusing on a blue-skinned witch with a pointy black hat, whose eyes dart to the left under an orange mask, and huddles under a bright red and black zig-zag shawl. Behind her are various figures engaged in party conversation, rendered in brushy pastel blues, yellows and reds. Across the top stretches a ribbon bunting with bows.

Leftover Party Witch

2021

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Mala Iqbal

A selfie of Mala Iqbal, a Pakistani-German-American woman with medium-light skin tone, long dark hair, and black frame glasses. Her black tshirt has an illustration of a skull and bones.

Mala Iqbal was born in the Bronx in 1973 and grew up in a household where three cultures and four languages intersected. She has had solo exhibitions at Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn; Ulterior Gallery, Bellwether Gallery, and PPOW in New York; Taylor University in Upland, Indiana; Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia; and Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. Her series of collaborative paintings, made with Angela Dufresne, was shown in October 2021 at the Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery, SUNY Purchase, and will be exhibited at LSU in Baton Rouge in Fall 2023. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the United States as well as in Australia, China, Europe, and India. Her work has been reviewed in various publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker. Iqbal has been awarded artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship in Painting in 2008. Mala Iqbal lives and works in New York City.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2023

Website / Social Links

“ Belonging and not belonging is something I have negotiated since childhood as a lesbian first-generation American with immigrant parents from very different geographies and cultural/religious backgrounds. My sketchbooks mix observational drawings and invented scenes—allowing me to place metaphysical, at times outright mannerist exaggerations of bodies and gestures right next to realisms. My paintings depict scenarios where the weirdos are the heroes or where anyone would be vulnerable—in loneliness, in awkward positions, asleep on the bus.”

Related Journal Entries

ala Iqbal, a Pakistani-German-American woman with medium-light skin tone, shoulder-length dark hair, and black glasses, mixes paint on a glass panel in her painting studio. On the walls behind her we see paintings big and small and a group of stacked canvases.

In the Studio: Mala Iqbal

"For me, stories are a way of understanding the world around me—understanding hi...