Khalil Chishtee, Born in Lahore, Pakistan.
Khalil Chishtee (1964) is a visual artist based in New York City. Chishtee holds a MA in studio arts from Sac State, Sacramento, CA. Before moving to States he taught at National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, for ten years. Besides exhibiting his work Chishtee has done public commissions in major cities of Pakistan and USA.
As a child Khalil Chishtee learned the art of calligraphy from maestro painter Sadeqain in Lahore. Sadeqain’s masterly done non-traditional calligraphic paintings seems all figures to him, for young Chishtee these were dancing or acrobatic movements of a human body all over his canvases, analogous with that Chishtee instead of using Urdu or Arabic letters, chose figures to narrate his stories.
Chishtee intends his art for transformation rather than decoration, diversion or indoctrination. In his view the art is meant to serve for cultivating knowledge of how to be in the world, for going through life. And it can be effective for developing a deeper understanding of your own experiences.
Enveloped in a complex of sight and tangible objects, his work is meant to incite in the viewer a fluid, non-linear experience that often resembles a dream, a reverie, or a nightmare. His installations are not tableaux-vivants, and the characters are not weightless sleepwalkers but real people of our time, inspired by the hoi polloi. This is how he relates to the common man on the street; the sheer choice of material (trash bags and bin-liners) and the transformation of the mundane experience into a visual pun further testify to this agenda.
His installations, sculptures, and site-specific works have been exhibited internationally at locations such as 56 th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia 2015, Here Today...;
The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.