AMNA ASGHAR:
WELL WISHES

JUNE 4 – AUGUST 8, 2021

Well Wishes is the first solo museum exhibition of Detroit artist Amna Asghar. The show features works that intertwine Asghar’s familial archive with found images from American and Pakistani popular cultures. This exhibition suggests that art is a technology that can flatten time, shorten geographical distance, and speak across cultural borders.

Well Wishes engages elements of Asghar’s practice in which the artist appropriates iconic cartoon imagery and classical landscape painting to infer portals revealing other realms, desires, or wishes. Specifically, the exhibition intertwines the Romanticism Art movement’s Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life series, representing an allegory of the four stages of human life – childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age – with Asghar’s contemporary pop aesthetic. The exhibition is inspired by Asghar’s curiosity around what can be discovered by a collective group of viewers at the intersection of personal narrative, arts movements, and mass media.

Activated as a site for communion, Well Wishes presents a series of large-scale paintings hung in a manner that pokes fun at the spatial limitations of a museum gallery. This exhibition seeks to advance the viewers’ perception of the function of a gallery to provide a space for collective contemplation where exchanges of thoughts, feelings, and stories are shared across communities. Well Wishes invites viewers to contemplate the nature in which we consume artwork beyond an individual experience but rather as a communal experience where stories intersect.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amna Asghar (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Detroit, MI. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Her work has been featured in the Armory Show FOCUS section with Harmony Murphy Gallery, curated by Jarrett Gregory. She has shown at Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY; Super Dutchess, New York, NY; Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, NY; Hawkeye Crates, Brooklyn, NY; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC and Para Site, Hong Kong, CN, and VisArts, Rockville, MD. Asghar is currently represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York.

Well Wishes is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Jova Lynne, Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator. Well Wishes and its affiliated programs are funded by awards from the Ford Foundation, Michigan Humanities (an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image: Amna Asghar, Agra and Baghdad, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.