Jan Agha

Jan Agha (born in 1986) is a Pakistani born artist but travelled widely even from a young age. A traveller, vagabond that makes his identity, oeuvre and stories through the process of taking apart constructs of visual and social nature, whilst establishing his own religion/ symbolism/ deities/ saints and when called, they all line up, speak different tongues, they gather under the banner of awkward nomad existence. Like the Tower of Babylon, or like Rome, they welcome all mischievous deviants. 

Between 2005–2008 Jan spend his time with mystics and performance artists while working as an estate agent. But due to a severe accident had to stop all practices. In 2013 Jan Agha chose to do art against the wishes of his family and peers. He started his BA in Fine Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, where he graduated in 2016. Jan Agha then continued his studies where he pursued painting doing an MA from the Royal College of Art (graduating in 2018). During his BA at the University of Hertfordshire Jan Agha concentrated on scroll-like paintings, which were focused highly on narrative. Whereas in his MA at RCA he was fascinated with the confrontation of expression gateways and in duality. Jan Agha is currently based in Stoke-on-Trent in the UK, known as the home of ceramics, which has contributed to his exploration into the material of clay.

Jan Agha recognises himself as an oriental painter who likes to explore the impulses of self and the cultural barriers built around him without using any native cultural references. Instead, he uses the impulses that are provoked from arriving from a different background into a contemporary society, and aim to make religious and cultural iconography of his own. The colours Jan Agha uses are rhythms that explore intimate feelings such as angst, infatuation and sexuality. From super-sacred to hyper-sexual, his work explores the figure, flesh and the alchemy of paint. Immensely interested in history mysticism and the occult. Jan Agha's motif of the cone which is one borrowed from his first ever lesson in drawing. A fragment of a deconstructed face. It represents the boy with intense imagination to the fool who restricts communication in order to remain in the divine cradle of creative influx. His paintings are a gateway to psychologically charged portraits, with mark making that has it's roots in Persian academicism.

In his most recent work, Jan Agha wants to define the relationship between a lost object and a lost individual, to a found object and a found individual. As a ghost whisperer between the archaic and the modern. His paintings are like talismans, that are blessed with colours. While the act of creating summons a bridge between Jan and the divine.