Shireen Qureshi is based in London and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2010.
Her work has consistently revolved around the practice of painting, with the human body its central, obsessive theme. Utilising the disturbed privacy of the domestic interior as an arena of choice, the paintings enter the viewer into a voyeuristic world which simultaneously touches upon both the strange and the everyday. She draws from the sensations of the human figure such as the contorted simplicity of sleeping or the suggestive texture of flesh, as well as the ambiguities supplied by the paint itself. This creates hybrid forms occupying a dream space which hint at the reality of the recognisable body as they illustrate invisible and unnameable forces.
The paintings aim to pull apart the borders of the human form, tugging on skin and limbs to create a sense of underlying emotion or a fragmentary hint at narrative. Objects and bodies are placed with a deliberate intent to nudge towards the suggestion of a mysterious and dark world. Through the intervention of paint, the body is enveloped by the domestic environment, swallowed by black holes and tugged into pieces of hair, bone and flesh. Within this lies the corrosive and bored monotony of everyday life; banal details which pin point and hook the figure inescapably to reality; a coke can, a remote control, a fork. The works simultaneously hint at delusion or fantasy, utilising the vague discomfort of surveillance and the unspoken violence of bodily sensation. The human body hovers between figuration and abstraction, layered painted ghosts which retain their visibility whilst also shuddering into their surroundings.