Maria Qamar

Maria Qamar is a first-generation Canadian from a traditional South Asian family; her mother is Indian, her father Bangladeshi. She moved to Canada at the age of nine in 2001 and was forced to endure bullying and racism as a young girl in a post 9/11 world. She later recalled, “I started going home and drawing comics about these experiences.” Qamar found her artistic voice five years ago through Instagram under the name @Hatecopy where her illustrations resonated with the Desi community, particularly the second generation. Art became a means for her to handle realities of being brown and South Asian in the early 2000s North American context. Qamar’s Bollywood-beautiful women paintings with ironic cartoon speech bubbles speak to the trail and tribulations of 21st-century Desi life and the challenges of being a South Asian millennial. On August 1, 2019, Maria Qamar broke into the New York art world with her first U.S. solo exhibition FRAAAANDSHIP! at RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY, which received great press acclaim by The New York Times, Forbes, Vice, TimeOut New York, and Artnet News. In December 2019, Qamar exhibited in Europe for the first time presenting the solo exhibition FIGHT BETI, FIGHT! at Phillips Paris. Her work is collected by Mindy Kaling and was featured on The Mindy Project. She is also the author of the book Trust No Aunty published in 2017. Her artwork has been shown in the AGO in Toronto, Mumbai Comicon, and the Oxo Tower Wharf in London, England. She has been featured on NPR, CBC, HarpersBAZAAR.com, in The Toronto Star, and Elle. Maria currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.