Mobeen Akhtar is a self-taught British Pakistani artist whose practice traces a parallel journey of spiritual, cultural, and environmental reflection. Working with traditional miniature techniques, she seeks a deeper connection with the Divine while exploring her identity as a British-born woman of the diaspora. Her work grows from a place of quiet contemplation and unfolds through a slow, meditative process that enables her to examine different facets of human existence, including spirituality, ethics, moral inquiry, and the physical mark we leave on the Earth. Her inquiry extends into the unseen, recognising that the energies created through human action move beyond the tangible world and leave an imprint on the metaphysical realm, the unseen space in which the soul resides.

Her practice begins long before the brush meets the surface. It starts with gathering materials, preparing pigments by hand, and giving careful attention to each surface. This intimate relationship with process grounds her, allowing form, colour, and symbolism to become instruments for reflection. Her discipline is shaped by a deep fascination with traditional techniques and the illumination found in classical Persian and Indian miniatures as well as Quran folios, all of which speak to harmony, balance, and beauty.

In recent years, Mobeen has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary of circles, birds, and delicately interwoven patterns. Raised 24k gold and a vibrant colour palette bring these motifs to life, allowing them to act as gentle metaphors for cyclical existence, unfolding journeys, and the search for spiritual connection beyond the self. Her compositions, refined yet vivid, have been described as visual prayers or poetry, offering viewers a sense of quiet expansion, comfort, and an intuitive feeling of belonging to something greater.

Her work responds to the challenges we face both individually and globally. She is driven by a desire to bring light into places of darkness and to encourage reflection on what unites rather than divides.

Mobeen more recently has used miniature techniques to remember and honour a distant land she is connected to through culture, ancestry, and memory. In her future work, she hopes to explore the experiences of her forebears, including their struggles, devotions, and enduring love for their homeland, and give new life to these stories through her distinctive, vibrant palette. By transforming landscapes shaped by ancestral history into uplifting, luminous imagery, she seeks to preserve the poetry and identities that have shaped her people.

A dedicated collector of natural pigments, she works with earth gathered from places such as the Isle of Wight, the Congo, Kashmir, and the Island of Hormoz in Iran. Each pigment is prepared by hand, allowing the memory of the land to infuse her colours with depth, presence, and resonance. This material intimacy grounds her practice and reflects her appreciation for nature’s miracles, painting elements of the natural world using nature’s own gifts.

Since 2018, her work has entered private collections worldwide and been exhibited internationally, from London to India.

For Mobeen, art is a continuous journey of self-discovery, a spiritual pursuit intertwined with her lived experience as a woman in the diaspora and as a human being within a wider global society. She is guided by awe for the perfection of creation and senses a higher vibrational divine energy alive in the natural world. Each painting becomes a gesture of gratitude, an invocation, and a quiet testament to the divine pulse that moves through all things.

reunion collection