| New York-based artist Nadiyah Jinnah was brought up in Africa and is of South Asian descent. She draws on the depths of a long cultural history and from the inspirational surroundings in which she finds herself during her travels across the globe for bold-hued “lifescapes.” More specifically however, in her recent show at Broadway Gallery in New York City, Jinnah has taken up as her subject matter the complex beauty of the Mediterranean coastline. | 
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Simone Cappa on Nadiya Jinnah
New York-based artist Nadiyah Jinnah was brought up in Africa and is of South Asian descent. She draws on the depths of a long cultural history and from the inspirational surroundings in which she finds herself during her travels across the globe for bold-hued “lifescapes.” More specifically however, in her recent show at Broadway Gallery in New York City, Jinnah has taken up as her subject matter the complex beauty of the Mediterranean coastline. In this show of new works by the artist, Jinnah again proves her Chagall-esque mastery of color and texture, but this time within the specific terms of the ever-shifting Mediterranean. Captured in the rise and fall of her unique technique of applying clay as a negative mold against the surfaces of her canvases, Jinnah’s work here incorporates an unfiltered rainbow of color that represents the hundreds upon hundreds of gradations inherent in this temperate sea.
In her work Sun Expressions, four panels of radiating light and color unite to form a powerful image of our earth’s ultimate energy source upon which all life, both on land and at sea, is entirely dependent. Here, Jinnah constructs fine bursts of bulging clay reminiscent of the blisters of intense heat and solar winds found upon the sun’s violent surface. Each panel here has a different color scheme than the last, and it is the fact that Jinnah has incorporated a slightly different texture and consistency into each that most fully points to the diversity of the vital environments that the sun supports. Here, the subtle alterations in color and texture upon each canvas represent the complex “lifescape” that is our natural world. The Mediterranean may be only a tiny facet of this vast universal scheme but, within this arresting series, the artist proves that this aspect of our global ecosystem provides extensive fodder for conceptual as well as visual exploration.
In a work like her triptych Ocean Glory, for instance, Jinnah establishes an off-kilter world just beneath the ocean’s surface within which vibrant life flourishes under the push and pull of the ocean current’s constant sway. Particularly dominant in this underwater scene is a substantial yellow and orange entity that appears to twist and turn its way across the length of all three canvases. Although Jinnah’s oeuvre is rarely figurative, this work suggests the likes of sea creatures like shrimp or brightly colored corals, thanks in large part to the complex patterns of texture that the artist works onto the canvases’ surfaces.
The textures Jinnah applies in this work, however, are most successful of all in terms of their play with light and shadow. When viewed under a light source of any kind, the tiny ripples that the artist so carefully crafts here glimmer like the inconstant surface of the sea. All in all, Ocean Glory could not be a more stunning example of this artist’s immense talent at refracting the world around her in an even more immaculate and brightly hued light than she originally found it.
In a time of increasing ecological anxiety, Jinnah joins a growing number of artists whose works, both implicitly and explicitly, confront the fragility of our unstable planet. Jinnah’s majestic canvases both survey and successfully evoke the beauty and the ferocity of the natural world, but they also force us to reconsider the present-day vulnerability of the landscapes that she so eloquently captures through light, color, and texture.
