Saad Qureshi is a multidisciplinary artist whose works considers the collapse and revival of objects throughout the process of their creation. Using drawing, sculpture and installation, Qureshi constructs “mindscapes” drawn from both his own and other’s memoirs, which he translates into a visual language. As it is primarily informed by imagination, his work typically appears fragmented, unstable and distorted in its final form. Hovering in this way between construction and deconstruction, the work defies abstract description, but creates diverse and creative responses from viewers. The ideas and impressions that Qureshi’s work stimulates are fragile and fleeting; motifs take shape, fade and emerge again. 

Keen observer of different, often opposing ideals and belief systems, Saad makes work about location and dislocation, the energy and movement of diaspora and the merging and curdling of cultures. His unpopulated landscapes are what Qureshi terms ‘mindscapes’.  Drawn from memories, his own or second-hand, the outcomes are new truths, happy or unhappy accidents, that present a sometimes harrowing yet contained reality. As it is primarily informed by imagination, his work typically appears fragmented, unstable and distorted in its final form. Hovering in this way between construction and deconstruction, the work defies abstract description, but creates diverse and creative responses from viewers. The ideas and impressions that Qureshi’s work stimulates are fragile and fleeting; motifs take shape, fade and emerge again.

Persistence of Memory (2011) is a series of ink drawings that capture images of the artist’s memories that are subject to his constant revision in the pursuit of accuracy. The often incomplete and sabotaged works throw light on the process of memory and the inevitability of visualising the past as a series of broken-up, disconnected details. In his own words: “Totality is an illusion, you can only look at things in fragments. You can see this is the process of reading as the eye moves from word to word to understand of the whole story. The mind is like a needle reading the vinyl record in a linear fashion.”

Saad Quereshi (b.1986) is an MFA graduate of the Slade School of Art in London (2010). He is the winner of the Red Mansion Foundation Prize (2009), a nominee of the Celeste Prize for International Contemporary Art (2012) and the bursary winner of the Royal British Society of Sculptors (2012). He first emerged in the public eye for being one of the six finalists on BBC television show School of Saatchi.