Sahar Riaz

Sahar Riaz has been painting since her school years. That early start matters because it means her practice did not begin with formal instruction; it began with instinct. The training came later, a Bachelor of Arts and Design from Government College for Women in Lahore, followed by a Diploma in Graphic Design from the Institute of Arts and Design in the same city, and it gave her a technical vocabulary to work with. But the impulse to make images was already there.

Born in Pakistan in 1981 and based in the UAE, Sahar works across painting, illustration, and digital design. Her formal background sits across two disciplines, fine art and graphic design, and both are visible in her work. The graphic design training brings compositional clarity and an awareness of how colour functions as communication. The painting practice brings everything else: texture, gesture, emotional directness.

Faces are a recurring subject in her work, painted in bright, often unexpected colours and treated as studies in human expression rather than straightforward portraiture. She uses thick brushstrokes and mixed media, building surfaces that are as much felt as seen. For Sahar, painting is storytelling. The face becomes a site where interior states are made visible, where what cannot easily be said finds another way out.

Her involvement in theatre adds another dimension to this. She contributes to stage design and character development, work that is also fundamentally concerned with how appearance communicates feeling and how a visual environment shapes the experience of those within it.

In 2022, she held her first solo exhibition, 'Resurgence', at Zabeel Ladies Club in Dubai. She is currently planning the launch of her own gallery, a next step that reflects the seriousness with which she approaches both her practice and its place in the wider artistic community.