Emerging as a notable talent among Pakistan’s new generation of artists, Hiba Schahbaz has become recognized for her dynamic and evolving body of work. Her distinctive brushwork and stylistic choices exhibit an individuality, yet her art remains fluid and exploratory, traversing new boundaries in scale, medium, and subject matter. Born in Karachi, Pakistan's vibrant cultural capital, Schahbaz weaves her South Asian heritage with the influences of her artistic development in New York City. Her formal art education began with a focus on miniature painting at Pakistan’s National College of Arts in Lahore and later expanded to a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in New York City. Active in the art world since 2002, Schahbaz has consistently exhibited her work, providing a refreshing cross-cultural perspective that bridges disparate artistic traditions.

Rooted in the centuries-old Indo-Persian tradition of miniature painting—particularly of the Mughal musawwari—Schahbaz’s foundational training connects her to an artistic heritage rich in ritualistic discipline. This tradition, with its meticulous handcrafting of brushes, papers, and pigments, embodies a pedagogy based on osmosis and repetition. Apprentices learn by observing and imitating masters, often spending hours drawing minute lines on paper while seated barefoot on the floor. Schahbaz, deeply captivated by these ritualistic methods, has infused this technical precision into her own evolving style.

In her work, Schahbaz reinterprets and challenges the formal constraints of miniature painting, making a bold statement by foregrounding the nude female figure—an unconventional and even radical choice within this genre. Her intention in depicting unclothed women is to free them from specific temporal or geographical contexts, thereby removing interpretative constraints and allowing her figures to embody a universal, timeless presence.

Schahbaz also employs neem rang, a traditional tea-based pigment, as a chromatic homage to her cultural roots. This medium resonates with personal significance, evoking memories of shared moments over tea with family and friends and recalling the intimate act of drinking tea with her grandfather. Through the integration of this medium, Schahbaz weaves a palpable human connection into her compositions, anchoring her work in both memory and cultural symbolism.

A recurring theme in Schahbaz’s practice is the portrayal of the female form—soft, unguarded, and infused with an assertive femininity. Her figures, with flowing dark hair, and brown skin, are often quasi-self-portraits that encapsulate aspects of her identity. The nudes exude a powerful eroticism through their commanding stances and direct gazes, allowing the depicted subjects to retain autonomy over their sensuality and agency. This intimate portrayal, whether of a woman before a mirror or in a moment of relaxation, invites viewers into a private and empowered feminine space. In these scenes, nature emerges as a secondary protagonist, harmoniously intertwined with the figure through representations of flora, fauna, and mythical beings such as mermaids, winged lions, and serpentine dragons.

Schahbaz’s fascination with dragons culminated in her recent solo exhibition, Summer of Dragons, at Almine Rech’s London gallery in September 2024. Here, she unveiled fifteen paintings depicting dragons, reimagining them not as antagonistic beasts in battle, as traditionally depicted in both Eastern and Western iconographies, but as protectors and allies of women, symbolizing resilience and guardianship.

Additionally, Schahbaz incorporates modern architectural elements into her works, blending motifs from her past and present environments. In The Artist’s Studio (2012; tea, gouache, and watercolor on Wasli paper), for example, a reclining nude figure lies on a floor patterned with designs reminiscent of Pakistani rugs, while the presence of two windows with a fire escape gestures unmistakably to New York City and Schahbaz’s studio space whilst at university.

Evolving from the small, precise format of traditional miniature to a monumental scale, Schahbaz’s canvases today depict Amazonian female figures whose presence and gaze dominate the viewer’s field of vision. In this transition, she not only expands the physical dimensions of her works but also deepens their conceptual reach, rendering her women as powerful embodiments of cultural synthesis, self-assertion, and transcendent beauty.