Tania Qurashi

Tania Qurashi is a painter who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Qurashi attended The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts in 2016. She is currently a graduate candidate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She has attended a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and completed the Tyler School of Art Summer Painting & Sculpture Intensive in Philadelphia, PA, and a residency at Goldsmiths College in London, UK. Qurashi has exhibited her work in group exhibitions including Asian Arts Initiative, Stella Elkins Gallery, Anne Bryan Gallery and The University of the Arts. Her work often explores portraits of musicians, crushes, characters, and objects that attempt to provide narratives that explore adolescent obsessions, transference, projection, adoration, and identity. Her work is interested in the melancholy and longing for a lost object that is similar to romance and heartbreak towards one’s cultural identity. As a product of an interracial marriage, she considers identity to be multiplicitous, vulnerable, and even unreliable. Her portraits serve as a way to communicate feelings of love and tension that are inspired by the marriage between her Guatemalan mother and Pakistani father as well as an exploration of forming one’s identity based on the people and things we love.