MFA candidate 2027, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD

Lives and works in Maryland, US.

Born, London, England.

Selected solo and two-person exhibitions:

  • 2024, Transverse Gallery for Contemporary Art, Poughkeepsie, NY

  • 2024. Gallery 50, Rehoboth Beach, MD

  • 2024, Gallery 90, Severna Park, MD

  • 2022, Vivid colors, vibrant nature, d’Art Center, Norfolk, VA

Selected group exhibitions:

  • 2026, Confluence, Kaplan Gallery,VisArts. Rockville, MD

  • 2025, Constructed Memory, Sheila and Richard Riggs Gallery, Baltimore, MD

  • 2025, Painting Today, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, (online), curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg

  • 2024, Landscapes, theBLANC gallery, NY, NY.

  • 2024, The Voice of Colors, Arts to Hearts Project, (online)

  • 2024, Abstract Art, Royal Blue Gallery, (online)

  • 2024, New member exhibit, Silvermine Galleries, New Canaan, CT

  • 2023, Fall member show, Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

  • 2023, 73rd A-ONE Exhibition, Silvermine Galleries, New Canaan, CT

  • 2023, Winter member show, Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

  • 2023, Elemental 2023, Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

  • 2023, Midsummer madness, Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

ABOUT

Aysha Akhtar is a London-born artist of Pakistani immigrant parents. After spending more than twenty-five years as a neurologist, public health specialist, and military officer, Akhtar has decided to pursue art. She enrolled in an MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2024, with a focus on painting. She has participated in three solo shows and multiple group shows, including galleries and venues such as Site: Brooklyn, the Transverse Gallery for Contemporary Art, Arts to Hearts Project, and the Blanc Gallery in New York. In 2024, she was selected as one of three emerging women artists to watch by Women in Arts Network. Akhtar lives in Maryland, U.S.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings envision lush landscapes in continual flux with spaces shaped by multiplicity, tension, and transformation. This sensibility is rooted in my childhood experience growing up in the United States, continually navigating between my parents’ Pakistani heritage and the culture of my American peers. Moving between these worlds, I often felt suspended, belonging fully to neither. This early awareness of layered identities and shifting viewpoints informs my landscapes.

In nature, I found a model for inclusivity—a system where difference coexists without hierarchy. While I work within the lineage of landscape painting, I seek to unsettle its conventions. Historically, landscape has been framed through a human-centered gaze that, even in reverence, reinforces ideas of human dominance which underpins environmental exploitation. In response, I aim to reimagine nature as a vibrant interconnected, self-determining entity, resistant to a singular perspective.

Drawing from influences such as Gustav Klimt and Odilon Redon, my landscapes feel immersive, intimate, and dream-like. Through layered compositions, my paintings resist hierarchies. Foreground and background dissolve, horizons recede or disappear, and forms emerge and submerge in a continuous state of transition. Through this fluidity, I evoke an alchemical process of transformation, where boundaries blur and perception remains in motion.