Asim Butt (artist)

Asim Butt (26 March 1978 – 15 January 2010) was a Pakistani painter and sculptor, with an interest in graffiti and printmaking. He was also a member of the Stuckism International art movement and founder of The Karachi Stuckists.

Life and work

Asim Butt was born in Karachi. He attended Li Po Chun United World College. He started painting at an early age, but at his parents' insistence, went to college, where he studied Social Sciences from the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He began a Ph.D. in History at UC Davis in California, but left the course after two years, when he participated in a group show mounted at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in March 2002 with Rigo '02 and LYRIC. He then returned to enroll in a B.F.A. in Painting in Karachi.

He participated in group shows in Karachi and Lahore, and in 2003 painted two murals in the environs of the shrine to the 8th Century Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. This is an area visited by many people each day and also home to many of Karachi's homeless, including beggars, transsexuals and drug addicts. One mural, about America's Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq, was called, 5 Ways to Kill a Man, inspired by Edwin Brock's poem. The other was about glue-sniffing children he encountered, while painting the first mural. Both murals were later whitewashed by city authorities.