Suleman Aqeel Khilji is a Pakistani visual artist and educator born in Quetta, Balochistan, in 1985. He graduated in painting from Lahore's National College of Arts (NCA) in 2011 and earned an MA from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2025. He teaches at NCA Lahore and has exhibited in Paris, Mumbai, and Oslo.
Suleman Aqeel Khilji is a Pakistani Visual Artist & Educator born in Quetta, Baluchistan in 1985.
Suleman Aqeel Khilji is a Pakistani visual artist who makes paintings that feel like memories drifting through time. Born in 1985 in Quetta, Pakistan, he creates work that blurs the line between what we know and what we imagine. His art explores how people move through spaces, how cultures mix, and how objects carry stories we never expected them to hold.
Suleman works across Pakistan, London, and now Oslo where he lives as an artist in residence. He teaches at the National College of Art in Lahore while building a reputation as one of South Asia's most thoughtful contemporary painters. His work appears in museums from New York to Norway, held in collections that understand why his floating objects and transitional landscapes matter to our world today.
Quetta sits between mountain passes where travelers move between Pakistan's tribal regions and the rest of the country. Suleman grew up watching people travel by bus and train, seeing tribal locals carrying their lives across borders and boundaries. These journeys shaped how he thinks about space and movement in his paintings.
His artistic training began in Paris during 2009 when he joined a student exchange program at École des Beaux-Arts. That experience opened his eyes to European art history while keeping his Pakistani identity intact. He returned to Pakistan to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National College of Art in Lahore, graduating in 2011 with a degree in Painting.
The real transformation happened in London. From 2022 to 2025, Suleman studied at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, one of the oldest and most respected art institutions in the world. He received the Edna Rose Weiss Award during his time there and will graduate with his degree in June 2025.
Suleman calls painting his "kind of home." But like any journey home, he takes detours. Old book covers, cigarette packs, and pieces of wood become his detours. These found objects transform into thoughts that extend beyond traditional canvas boundaries.
His work examines how figures move through transitional spaces. In his paintings, people float between drawing, watercolor, and oil on linen. The process becomes discovery through suggestions rather than statements. He creates what he calls "floating objects shown in transitional landscapes" that represent cultural, religious, and commercial anomalies in natural human environments.
The series "Another View" and "Landscape with Floating Objects" captures dislocated people and displaced feelings. His miniature portraits on cigarette packets evoke Mughal traditions while questioning what documentation means in contemporary art.
Suleman has shown work internationally since 2010. Major exhibitions include Art Basel and Art Basel Paris with STANDARD (Oslo), the Drawing Biennale 2023, and solo presentations at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. His 2026 exhibition "Transmission" at White Cube Paris features new paintings and works on paper.
In 2025, he won the Stewarts Prize and received a dedicated gallery space at Stewarts Law Firm's London office. STANDARD (Oslo) presented his solo show that same year, and he became artist-in-residence at Eton College in Berkshire.
His work appears in prestigious collections including the DIL Foundation New York, COMO Museum, SRK Homes, Luciano Benetton Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Kistefos Museum Norway, and the Arts Council Collection UK.
Beyond creating art, Suleman teaches. He serves as permanent faculty at National College of Art Lahore, where he graduated. His residencies include VASL Single Artist Residency in Karachi (2016), Muree Museum Artist Residency, Mansion Artist Residency, and the Munch's Studio Foundation Residency in Oslo (2025).
These experiences shape how he mentors young artists while continuing his own evolution as a painter who resides in the space between fact and fiction, documentation and imagination.
As an artist, I reside in painting. It is a kind of home. Yet, on the way home, one often takes detours. Objects like old book covers, cigarette packs, and fragments of wood become those detours, small pauses that guide me back to painting. I think of them as thoughts, extending themselves onto other surfaces beyond the canvas.
— Suleman Aqeel Khilji