Mala Iqbal
AMONG US
September 10 through October 10, 2026
Opening Reception
Wednesday, September 9, from 6–8 pm
Gallery hours:
Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM.
Location
53 Stanton Street
New York, NY 10002
608.556.4763
Press Release
JJ MURPHY GALLERY is pleased to present “Among Us," Mala Iqbal’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show of recent paintings opens Wednesday, September 9, 2026, from 6 to 8 PM and runs from September 10 through October 10. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM.
At least initially, the show's title suggests our sense of shared community. Iqbal's large painting “Subway Riders" (2026), where a diverse group of people of all ages peacefully coexist while packed inside a crowded subway car during rush hour, appears to embody this notion. Yet the title implies another meaning, namely the potential fracture of community and the various threats to the concept itself. With deep empathy for her subjects, she depicts people brutalized by war and violence, perpetrated by those who also happen to live among us.
Roberta Smith aptly describes Iqbal's paintings "in which the political, the painterly, and the luminous collaborate, brought in alliance by a confident touch." Iqbal employs a mixture of different expressionistic styles. As a result of a daily drawing practice developed over the course of many years, direct observation plays a pivotal role. The artist acknowledges, "New York City is like a smorgasbord of diverse faces and bodies in every sense—age, race, ethnicity, size, everything."
Several paintings are more overt in depicting stunned residents walking amidst rubble, general indifference to a person collapsed on an urban sidewalk, or a massive protest rally at Times Square. Other works involve more open narratives or what Nicole Eisenman has referred to as the ability to "orchestrate a story in an image. In “Through the Curtains" (2026), we witness the shocked expression of a figure peering out the window at what appears to be the aftermath of a bombing. Iqbal breaks the composition into three distinct sections: an abstract pattern on the inside curtain, the view distorted by the lace fabric, and finally, the events occurring in the street.
Iqbal creates a subtext of possible danger in “Who Goes There” (2026) through atmosphere and the solitary woman's wary look. In "Wading" (2025), a pregnant woman in a bathing suit seems so self-preoccupied as she walks offshore that she doesn't seem at all aware of the figures on the nearby beach at sunset. Iqbal has called her recent paintings "both a love letter to NYC and an acknowledgment of the literal and figurative unease and violence of our world."
Mala Iqbal has had previous solo exhibitions at Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn; Ulterior Gallery, PPOW, and Bellwether, New York City; and Richard Heller, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at Huxley-Parlour, London; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; Andrew Rafacz Gallery and NADA; Monya Rowe; and Ryan Lee Gallery. She was awarded a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2023 and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. Iqbal received a BA degree from Columbia University and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.