Madiha Hyder (b. Karachi, Pakistan 1983) graduated from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVSAA), Karachi with a BFA in 2006. Since then she has exhibited in group and solo shows across Pakistan and teaches painting at her alma mater IVSAA.

Hyder’s representational paintings encapsulate the gift of a narrative. She uses people, mostly children or young adults as barometers of social degradation, measuring as it were the amount of damage done to them by the violence surrounding them, some of it overt and some insidious. In other instances, Hyder uses her cats, present ones and those who have long gone, as metaphors of personal change, loss, memory, yearning and human adaptability. Her skill and composition are masterful and allow us to be undistracted by materiality and thus see ideas and relationships more closely.