My Small Dancing Particles

Waqas Khan is a Pakistani artist known for his large-scale Minimalist drawings made up of minuscule dashes and dots. He works on his drawings at night while in a trance-like state, with each work taking months to create. These drawings are inspired by patterns in nature and Sufism, the mystical dimension of the Islamic faith.

Khan created My Small Dancing Particles for his 2017 solo exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery. The drawing is a diptych made up of white marks on jet-black paper. One half of the diptych shows a complete semicircle of dashes and dots, while the other half shows its fragmented reflection.

Khan, who lives in Lahore, has described his drawings as ‘visible evidence of my contemplation on paper’.

The acquisition of this work by a South Asian artist marks a move in Manchester Art Gallery’s ambition to reflect more broadly the city’s multicultural population in its collections.