Lubna Agha

Lubna Agha (; 2 May 1949 – 6 May 2012) was a Pakistani-American painter and graphic designer. A 1967 graduate of the Karachi School of Art, she was among the first women in Pakistan to exhibit non-figurative abstract painting, coming to prominence in the early 1970s with her "White" series. After emigrating to the United States in 1981 she continued to exhibit in California, Massachusetts, and Pakistan, and in the 2000s developed a body of dot-pattern paintings on canvas and wood inspired by Islamic architecture she encountered in Morocco and Turkey.

Early life and education Agha was born Lubna Latif on 2 May 1949 in Quetta, where her father, a government officer, was posted at the time. Her family, originally from Delhi, and had moved to Pakistan after the partition of INdia.

In the mid-1960s, she enrolled at the newly established Mina School of Art (later renamed the Karachi School of Art), founded in 1964 by the sisters Rabia and Hajra Zuberi, graduates of the Lucknow College of Arts, together with the painter Mansoor Rahi. According to Rahi's spouse and painter Hajra Mansoor, Agha was the school's first student. She graduated in 1967 and taught for a year at Ali Imam's Central Institute of Art in Karachi. A 1971 solo show at the Arts Council in Karachi, which filled the main hall with around sixty abstract paintings, is widely regarded as the breakthrough of her career.

Through the 1970s, she developed her "White" series, minimalist works dominated by white grounds with cotton-ball forms delineated by calligraphic lines and passages of black and red. Her California work marked a return to figuration, with drawings and watercolours in which disjointed, ungrounded figures expressed the experience of migration and cultural displacement. This late body of work was the subject of a monograph, Lubna Agha: Points of Reference, written by Sirhandi and published in 2007 by the Foundation of the Museum of Modern Art, Pakistan. Works from the series were acquired by the United States Department of State's Art in Embassies programme and were used on the covers of two poetry anthologies supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Her final solo exhibition, Points of Reference: Paintings Cite Islamic Visual Legacy, was held at the Gardiner Art Gallery of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater in February 2012.

Legacy Works by Agha are held in the permanent collections of the Cartwright Hall Asian collection at Bradford Museums and Galleries in the United Kingdom, the Pakistan National Council of the Arts and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman. In 2016, the Karachi School of Art inaugurated the Lubna Agha Art Gallery in her memory, opening it with an exhibition of her paintings and a memorial lecture. In the same year, the VM Art Gallery in Karachi mounted the retrospective A Path All My Own, which brought together works from every phase of her practice.