Zubeida Agha

Zubeida Agha (1922–1997) [ Urdu: زبىده آغا ] was the first Pakistani modern artist. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, she was the first artist to have an exhibition of her paintings. She helped bring the modern idiom to Pakistan. Ms Agha was born in 1922 in Faislabad. After graduating from Kinnaird College, Lahore, she worked with B C Sanyal (1944–46). At this time she also became well acquainted with the works of Picasso, under the influence of Mario Perlingeri, an Italian prisoner of war in India. The Society of Fine Arts awarded her first prize for modern painting in 1946. She joined St Martin's School, London, in 1950, moving on to Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1951. In 1961 she was appointed executive director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Rawalpindi, receiving the President's Award for Pride of Performance in 1965.

Zubeida Agha is recognized and lauded as a premiere painter of Pakistan. In the changing ethos of thirties and the forties, she had the courage and determination to launch a modern idiom of painting, which first baffled and later overwhelmed art critics and viewers...She is one of the great colorists in Pakistani painting. She employs colour not only for itself, but to lend veracity and meaning to her images, culled from life and restructured by her amazing imagination to provoke the viewer into thought.

On 14 August 2006, Pakistan Post issued a Rs. 40 sheetlet of stamps to posthumously honour 10 Pakistani painters. Besides Zubeida Agha, the other nine painters were: Laila Shahzada, Askari Mian Irani, Sadequain, Ali Imam, Shakir Ali, Anna Molka Ahmed, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Ahmed Pervez and Bashir Mirza.