Amna Asghar’s “Portals,” on view through October 13 at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, comprises twelve works: painting, screen prints, and sometimes combinations of the two, all on canvas. While her earlier paintings sampled pages from Pakistani digest magazines, her new works (all 2019) pull imagery—primarily renderings of skies—from depictions of the Orient in Disney movies and by European artists. Scenes by the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme recur in Asghar’s work alongside excerpts from The Jungle Book (1967) and Aladdin (1992). Below, Asghar discusses how her work grapples with these exoticized images, which are simultaneously alluring and troubling.

I was thinking about portals while pregnant last year: at the OB-GYN, I would lie down and look up through a skylight above me. In a situation that was otherwise uncomfortable and sterile, the window would transport me to a different place. I’ve always thought about paintings as portals, and I also started thinking about my own body as a portal. The sky paintings offer more restful, and contemplative spaces that I didn’t have in previous works—a response to feeling overwhelmed and angry about the current political climate. They’re those moments of quietness when you just don’t know what to do. Read More