Tanya Minhas grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. She subsequently attended graduate school at Columbia University, and the Art Students League where she painted portraits in oil. 

Minhas ventured away from figurative painting, making repetitive drawings using ink, paint, and yarn about the unseen miniscule energies that subtly direct our lives. Her recent art practice explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, and how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world. 

Minhas says of her work, “Each painting is about an invisible memory or impression left by the myriad different forces in nature – a leaf falling to the earth displaces air as it falls, tracing an invisible pattern, that I can see with my heart, or my imagination, or whatever it is in myself that finds these moments important, and yet I am unable to express the awe of it precisely with words.”