Mala Iqbal Paints the Space We Share With Strangers
Her new paintings remind us that the world is a room we share with strangers, most of whom are looking elsewhere.
Figures jostle the surface of every Mala Iqbal canvas with the energy of a great metropolis. Many are bathed in an orange and yellow glow, a tinge of artifice for people who live under electric light, places where even the sun isn't enough. Some of the paintings forgo that effect, like "Through the Curtains” (2026). Left to right, we see a scene of collapse, which is obscured by a tulle curtain rendering like a faded negative; a figure reacts, almost numbly; and ultimately another curtain finishes the scene with a pictograph-like pattern — life, transformed by a screen, experienced by someone, and turned into an indecipherable language. I view it as a metaphor for how our screens deliver collapse and violence with every scroll, faster than we can process it.
Each work is about the construction of reality, sometimes cobbled together, other times layered and occasionally philosophized through the arrangement of images, figures, and signs. Social realism casts a long shadow, though the mood is closer to Matisse's ease. Her “Times Square” (2026) has the chalky palette of Ben Shahn, which gives the image its own terroir, and it never sours into despair.
Many of the paintings take place in subways, places where false intimacies give us the illusion of knowing. But the artist never drops the urban masks we wear as we stare into faces that look away or are obstructed and rendered into shapely flourishes, bringing to light strange but enticing surfaces. One figure is recognizable, that of the painter’s partner, artist Angela Dufresne, in “Subway Riders” (2026), who herself seems to be recording something of her own, staring towards us but not at us, reminding us how our own relationships depict us as much as we depict them.
