About

Hayat Gul is a Kashmiri, Karachi born artist who lives and works in NJ. Hayat spent her formative years in Montreal since the age of four and has been in the US since 1991.She is certified in Jikiden Reiki and works with people with addiction and co-occurring disorders.

She has shown her work at Kimmel Center NYU, MoCADA(Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art), NY, Art Gotham, NY, Abrons Art Center, NYC, Air Gallery,NYC, Saffronart, NYC, Queens Museum of Art, Taubman Museum,Florence Biennale, Florence Italy, Canton Museum of Art,BG Gallery,Santa Monica. She has also worked with the refugee kids at Baqa camp  in Amman, Jordan during her residency in 2010.

Her pieces are in private collections in the US and in Europe. Public collections include The Arab American National Musueum and Arab American Family Support Center. Hayat Gul is a self-taught artist and works with mixed media and shattered glass to create contemporary Islamic calligraphy and modern abstracts. Hayat also practices the ancient healing art of henna and runs a business and does workshops while creating her art.

My work examines disengagement and evolution that eventually leads to reconstruction. One of my favorite sayings is “Out of destruction comes renewal”. I am  perpetually intrigued by glass and its fragile, reflective quality while being strong enough to withstand harsh elements and began to use it  quite by accident.I’m attracted to disintegration, fragments, lines that lead us into the unseen or the forgotten, affixing us to the universe. The art that I create comes out of a fascination for the forgotten history that is often neglected because of material focus.

My current series is inspired by fractal art that was carved into the splendid structures that represent Islamic geometry such as the Al Hambra. I discovered these magnificent patterns in Islamic inspired architecture while staying in Jordon for my artist’s residency with  START. The geometric art that is created with fractals  is universally appealing and has been around since the early 9th century, not in the 17th as popularly believed.

www.hayatgul.com

Studio 33A Stuyvesant Ave LyndhurstNJ