Shamsuddin was born in1986 in Mian Sahib district Shikarpur Sindh. Now lives and worked in Lahore.He received BFA from the National College of
Arts Lahore, in fine arts miniature painting. He graduated in the year 2010 with the honors. After completing BFA he started his studio practice. His
basic inspiration started with his early teacher from Mian Sahib. He showed a passion and skill for drawing from an early age. He explored different
mediums but currently using gouache on wasli and arches paper. Selected Ecole des Beax Art, Paris France through an Exchange programin 2009.
He has participated in various groupshows. His work had been displayed in group shows locally and internationally.
Shamsuddin is capable of taking any subject and converting it into his personal idiom, through his tremendous ability of capturing the essence of
human body and details of objects around us. Trained as a miniature painter in the Department of Fine Art at National College of Arts, Shamsuddin
demonstrates how the concept of skill is not limited or confined. It is neither bound to history, nor chained to a region, and certainly not clamped by
a particular tradition.
Shamsuddin exercisesartist’s freedom and enjoys the freedom of his subjectsas well. Figureswith their origin in European classical painting emerge
in his new miniature, several without the convention of clothesor presented in prescribed roles/duties. Images of Madonna, muscularmen, cherubs,
and nude women are painted along with faces and figures from traditional Indian miniature painting. In his work, a viewer encounters the profile of a
Mughal Emperor, portrait of an Indian princess, presence of a maiden from Pahari School of painting – next to unmistakable features of Rembrandt,
reminding of his famous Self-Portrait.
In a sense Shamsuddin is focusing on the convention of painting and inquiring the links between different and distant practices of art making. Distant,
but not disconnected, as it has been noted that Western masters, Rembrandt for example, were not only aware of the Indian miniature painting, but
used these images to make drawings and other forms of art. Likewise European paintings brought to Mughal India had an impact on local painters,
so much so that one finds copies of some Western paintings or their elements infused in the miniature paintings, and some of their recurring themes
like Madonna and Child, and saints appearing in miniature paintings as well as in the frescos of Lahore Fort.