Omar Zafar | Arttyco

top of page

Omar Zafar

Painting as a Living Cognitive System

Reimagining the ontology of painting in an age of flux, data, and collective transformation.

1/2

https://www.instagram.com/ozafarstudios/

https://omarzafar.com/

Omar Zafar’s practice challenges the very foundations of what painting can be. His work steps beyond image-making to explore painting as a thinking organism — a system that breathes, shifts, and evolves alongside the instability of contemporary life.

Grounded in philosophical inquiry and material experimentation, Omar Zafar approaches painting as an open cognitive field rather than a static object. His work questions the inherited paradigms of twentieth-century abstraction and asks how painting might adapt to a world shaped by technological acceleration, algorithmic authorship, and fractured perception.

Through three interdependent trajectories, Interactive Paintings, Colorless Paintings, and Surfaceless Paintings Zafar expands painting’s conceptual framework. His interactive works function as evolving systems of distributed authorship, inviting viewers to rearrange magnetic fragments and participate in the construction of meaning. His colorless paintings dissolve chroma into transparency and light, transforming visibility itself into a subject. And his surfaceless pieces suspend dried pigment directly in space, pushing painting beyond the canvas toward a state of fragile, unanchored materiality.

Across these investigations, Zafar positions painting as a metaphor for consciousness: mutable, decentralized, and perpetually in motion. His practice operates as heuristic research, probing perception, temporality, and the shifting boundaries between human and machine intelligence. For Zafar, painting does not depict the world it embodies it, offering new ways of sensing and understanding the complexity of the present.

Wounded building Courtesy of the artist	transection of architectural ligaments Courtesy of the artist	ArterioArch Courtesy of the artist	Aortic Foyer Courtesy of the artist
In the city's embrace, wreckage distills, bending planes unseen Courtesy of the artist	Stadium №2 Courtesy of the artist

BIO

Omar Zafar (b. 1973, Dhaka) is a Bangladeshi-born, Greece-based artist whose conceptual practice redefines painting as a cognitive, evolving system. Educated in India and the United States, and shaped by formative years in New York’s experimental art scene, Zafar has developed a “hyper-eclectic” approach that merges philosophical inquiry, cultural hybridity, and material innovation. His career includes exhibitions in New York, Milan, Athens, Dhaka, Venice, and Shanghai, with a recent solo show — Painting Beyond Painting (Alibi Gallery, 2024) — marking a major return after a two-decade hiatus. Through interactive, colorless, and surfaceless painting trajectories, Zafar expands the ontology of the medium, exploring authorship, perception, and the destabilized nature of contemporary experience.

PUBLICATIONS

Zafar’s work and exhibitions have been featured in several catalogs and publications, including Painting Beyond Painting (Alibi Gallery, 2024) and Mine, Yours, His/Her’s, Theirs and Everybody Else’s Paintings (Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, 2000). His practice has been discussed in the context of contemporary abstraction, material experimentation, and conceptual painting across international platforms, reflecting his ongoing inquiry into the evolving nature of the medium.

PAINTING IN A STATE OF UNREST

Omar Zafar’s work invites viewers into a space where painting behaves like thought — shifting, recomposing, and resisting containment. By dismantling traditional structures and embracing fluidity, he proposes a vision of painting aligned with the rhythms of the present: unstable, participatory, and alive.

bottom of page