Aqeel Solangi was born in Ranipur, Sindh. He graduated with honours from the prestigious National College of Arts, Lahore in 2003 with a major in
Painting, followed by his first Masters degree MA (Hons.) Visual Art in 2005. He received his second Masters degree MA Fine Art (pass with merit)
from the Bath School of Art and Design – Bath Spa University, UK in 2016. He was the recipient of the renowned International Charles Wallace
Pakistan Trust Visiting Artist Fellowship for the King’s Foundation, School of Traditional Arts, London in 2006. Since then, he has been teaching at the
National College of Arts, Rawalpindi, currently as an Associate Professor and Head of the Painting and Sculpture departments. Solangi’s work has
been showcased in Pakistan and internationally. He was part of the 2013 Pakistani Artists’ workshop in China. Solangi has received ‘A Vision of the
Future-2006’ Young Artists Award by the Lahore Arts Council in 2006. Major survey of his work was exhibited at the Chawkandi Art in 2019, that was
accompanied the publication ‘Fictional Homelands’. His work has been reviewed by Dr. Michele Whiting, Dr. Akbar Naqvi, Aasim Akhtar, Marjorie
Husain, Nafisa Rizvi, Salwat Ali, Noor Jehan Mecklai and Sally Bennett. He has worked as sign and cinema board painter at Mehboob Painters in
Khairpur (Mir’s), and also attended extensive art courses at an early stage of his career at renowned artist Mussarat Mirza’s studio in Sukkur, Sindh.
Aqeel Solangi lives and works in Rawalpindi.
I have produced two works for the exhibition ‘A Square of Silence’ titled: Fading Field and Silence Between Two Halves.
The word field holds the repetition, it could be a garden or a visual field. The gradient red in the background gradually covers the Periwinkles, there
sense of time can be witnessed. The field usually suggests openness, vastness even expansion, here it is contained within a circle, that is sort of a
contradiction, I think that also makes the work more interesting.
In the ‘Silence Between Two Halves’, there is a hint of Yin Yang that, complementary forces yet interconnected energies that balance the universe.