Anwar Saeed is one of the most prominent painters from South Asia. He graduated from the NCA, Lahore, in 1978 and later attended the Royal College of Art, London, in 1985. Despite being known for challenging conventional ideas of masculinity and desire — difficult subjects within Pakistan — he continues to live and teach in Lahore.

As Salima Hashmi writes:
“Anwar Saeed comes from a generation of Pakistani artists whose student years were marked by the oppressive elements of the 1980s military regime. Since then, he has emerged as a painter and print maker, whose imagery evolves from complex cross-cultural sources. Christian motifs combine with Hindu, Buddhist, Greek mythology to form a personalized language that is at once poetic and compelling.”

(Salima Hashmi, The Eye Still Seeks, in Memory Metaphor Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007)

Anwar has been working on this body of work for over 40 years. The black-and-white imagery is lifted from contemporary Urdu newspapers, over which he paints a dreamlike nocturnal scene. Two male figures occupy a psychologically charged space — one earthly and casual in jeans, the other winged and symbolic — blurring the line between the ordinary and the divine.

The work balances humour, vulnerability, and mystery, inviting viewers to question who is watching whom, and what it means to exist under constant social or spiritual observation. The moon represents the divine — always present, constant, and watchful.