Khurshida Kamalova (Lola Kamal)

Khurshida Kamalova (Lola Kamal) is an Uzbek artist with a preference for bright, vivid colors. Born in the city of Bukhara, once one of the major stops along the Silk Road, Kamalova grew up surrounded by centuries-old cultural traditions. The ability to adapt and synthesize various cultures, historically attributed to the people of Central Asia, was the foundation from which Kamalova’s art developed, informed by a variety of impulses and influences.

Kamalova’s father, Jamal Kamal, was a well-known Uzbek writer and translator with a significant literary legacy, and the creative environment reigning in her family influenced Kamalova’s interest in art. In 1982–86, she studied at the P. P. Benkov Republican Art College in Tashkent. She considers her encounter with the legendary Uzbek artist Rakhim Akhmedov another important influence on her life as an artist. She met him when she was fourteen and began visiting his studio, where she took her first art lessons. Akhmedov became a source of inspiration and guidance for the young Kamalova, laying the groundwork for her artistic growth and development. From 1986 to 1991, she was a student at his studio at the State Institute for the Arts in Tashkent (now the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture).

While still at the Institute of Arts, outside of academic requirements, Kamalova began to try her hand at free pictorial improvisation. Like many young artists, she quickly felt the lift and freedom prevalent in society during the years of perestroika and glasnost (1985–90). A few of her paintings from those years, including Love Nectar (1985), The Feeling (1985, ZAM, D01615.01–04), and Dream (1985), reflect the artist’s attempts to capture and transmit powerful feelings and energies. The focus on expressive rhythms and colors from the natural world transforms the unusual shades depicted in her paintings that lie beyond the borders of reality, filling her images with existential meaning. Kamalova’s early style is characterized by contrasting colors with an exotic brightness that references postimpressionism, which has long been important for Uzbek artists.

Kamalova’s paintings Capro and Opora (1990), Red Passion (1990), and Emerging (1991) have symbolic and biographical content, reflecting the artist’s personal experiences and emotions. Despite the impression of spontaneously expressed emotions and the subtle connotations in the paintings from this period of Kamalova’s work, in these paintings she followed a disciplined approach to technique and composition, and her methods were firmly grounded in her training at the Institute of Arts. Later, Kamalova expanded her knowledge, diving into the study of Western modernist movements, which allowed her to combine traditional and avant-garde methods and to master new media.

In general, Kamalova enjoys a wide artistic range. She uses various techniques and materials, and without rejecting human emotions and the natural environment, she works from a particular perspective at the intersection of modernity and ecological harmony.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kamalova and her husband, Fatkhulla (Bek) Shakirov, moved to New York, where she now lives and works. There, Kamalova began a new phase of life and collaborative work with her husband. The first step was a collaboration with Margeotes Fertitta & Partners and the Stolichnaya vodka company. In the early 1990s, as one half of a creative partnership with Shakirov, she worked on a global campaign to advertise the brand. Images from the campaign, inspired by Russian avant-garde art, were published in over 200 magazines across the world, and were shown at an exhibition at the Forbes gallery in New York. Kamalova has been a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York since 1994.

Kamalova’s further development was influenced by the growing participation of artists in the fashion industry. In 1996, she and Shakirov began productive design collaborations with Ralph Lauren and Tiffany & Co. A successful partnership with Wathne (the former luxury brand that had a luxury boutique on 57th Street in Manhattan) led to their designs being featured at the Saks Fifth Avenue store. This success prompted Wathne to commission the pair to create seasonal collections, including the exclusive Samurai Collection for the Ginza store in Tokyo (1998). Kamalova and Shakirov learned traditional screen printing techniques in Japan, which made their collection unique. Back in the US, Kamalova earned a master’s degree at New York University.

In 2004, Kamalova and Shakirov founded the digital media studio Lola & Bek. The artists began to collaborate with such well-known magazines and publishers as the New York Times, Forbes, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Their graphic design illustration series The Magic under the Mangroves won a Davey Award (Gold) in 2024.

In 2005, the duo, continuing to master new media, made the animation Bibi, which screened at forty-six film festivals worldwide and received international acclaim. In 2006, Bibi won the award for the Best Children’s Short at the Sapporo Short Fest in Tokyo, which helped to increase their recognition in Japan. The Lola & Bek duo continued to expand their reach, creating media clips for hotels, music companies, and commercial centers, including Jersey Gardens, Millennium Hotels, Sony Music, Playhouse Disney, Nickelodeon, Microsoft, and MTV. In 2024, the New Jersey Department of State’s Division of Travel and Tourism invited the duo to work on their Wow campaign. The artists’ vibrant works were displayed on thirteen screens across Times Square, charming crowds in the heart of New York City.

At present, the dynamic creative duo of Lola & Bek are continuing to develop their style, organically synthesizing the aesthetics of the East and the dynamism of the new media of the West.

Nigora Akhmedova

Translated from Russian by Elina Alter