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:

  • 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, The Other Art Fair, Dallas, TX

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

  • 2022, American landscapes, Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

  • 2022, Women in art, Las Laguna Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

  • 2022, Art4Animals, Red Bluff Art Gallery, Red Bluff, CA

  • 2022, Kingdom animalia, Exhibizone Magazine

  • 2022, The power of portraits, MVA Gallery, Bethlehem, PA

  • 2021, Wind, District Arts Gallery, Frederick, MD

  • 2021, Luminosity, B Extraordinaire Gallery, US

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. Her art continues as an extension of her prior work as an advocate for social change to create a healthier, kinder world, with a focus on our relationship with nature. 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.

Aysha Akhtar’s artistic practice is driven by the question: if nature were to paint self-portraits, what would they look like? While continuing the legacy of landscape painting, she nevertheless upends traditional rules. Historically, landscape paintings have depicted nature through the human gaze. While often reverential, this gaze furthered the notion of human dominance over nature for exploitation, contributing to our environmental crisis.  Akhtar intends to create a new understanding of nature as an interweaving, living, unified system. In this eco-focused perspective, she essentially frees nature from human control. Her influences include the landscapes of Gustav Klimt, Charles Burchfield, the miniature paintings of ancient Persia, and Post-Impressionism.  Yet her work is in dialogue with that of contemporary landscape art. Through compositions that reveal no hierarchy or singular focus, her paintings feature nature in a continual state of emergence and submergence. The ever-shifting forms, and blurred categorizations and perspectives invoke alchemical processes of transformation. Through the sublime, she shows nature as an interconnected, complex, sentient worthy in it its own right.