Mala Iqbal Paints the City We Share With Strangers

Mala Iqbal's new canvases crowd with figures that, in the words of one review, carry "the energy of a great metropolis." Painted across 2025 and 2026, the works now on view depict strangers pressed together in subways, apartments and city squares, many of them bathed in an orange and yellow glow — a tinge of artifice, the review notes, "for people who live under electric light, places where even the sun isn't enough."

The centerpiece of the discussion is "Through the Curtains" (2026). Reading the canvas left to right, the reviewer describes a scene of collapse obscured by a tulle curtain rendered like a faded negative; a figure who reacts, almost numbly; and a final curtain finished with a pictograph-like pattern. The painting functions, in the reviewer's reading, as a metaphor for how screens deliver collapse and violence with every scroll, faster than we can process it. Life is transformed by a screen, experienced by someone, and turned into an indecipherable language.

What do the paintings borrow from art history?

The review places Iqbal's project squarely in the construction of reality — sometimes cobbled together, other times layered, and occasionally philosophized through the arrangement of images, figures and signs. Social realism casts a long shadow over the work, though the mood sits closer to Matisse's ease.

"Times Square" (2026) carries what the reviewer calls the chalky palette of Ben Shahn, giving the image its own terroir — a grounding in a specific place and atmosphere that, crucially, never sours into despair.

Who appears in the subway paintings?

Many of the canvases take place in subways, described as places where false intimacies give us the illusion of knowing. Iqbal never drops the urban masks riders wear as they stare into faces that look away, or faces obstructed and rendered into shapely flourishes that bring strange but enticing surfaces to light.

One figure stands out: the painter's partner, artist Angela Dufresne, who appears in "Subway Riders" (2026). Dufresne seems to be recording something of her own, staring towards us but not at us — a detail the reviewer reads as a reminder that our own relationships depict us as much as we depict them.

A detail image of "Transparent Friend" (2025), the earliest work cited, rounds out the body of new paintings, suggesting the project has developed across at least two years of studio work.

Taken together, the review positions Iqbal as a painter of shared urban space — its artificial light, its screens, its masks — and suggests that her strongest statements arrive when the city's collapse is filtered through a curtain and rendered, deliberately, unreadable.