Laila Bachtiar

*1971, Austria

Laila Bachtiar was born into a family of musicians in Vienna. Her mother is a cellist and her father, who has Afghan roots, studied singing, piano, trumpet and composition.

Laila Bachtiar began drawing at the age of four and her talent became obvious early on. While her mother was working, she lived in the communal houses of various social facilities. She has worked regularly at atelier gugging since 2003. But she first came to the Gugging House of Artists as early as 1990, basically as the first artist in residence and certainly as the first woman. Laila Bachtiar uses her own unique and sophisticated form of autistic communication. She has developed a specific drawing technique: First, she frames her subject – animals, figures, buildings, objects – and then she creates a net-like structure with surfaces. She then cross-hatches the surfaces with pencils and coloured pencils without paying much attention to the delineations of her borders. If she only uses a pencil, she covers the entire sheet with a web of lines; then, with great perseverance, she places line next to line and line across line until the work has achieved a unique intensity and concentration.

She lives in a shared appartment of a social institution in Klosterneuburg and with her mother in Vienna.

Her art is found in the Private Trust – Artists from Gugging (Privatstiftung – Künstler aus Gugging) and numerous private collections, such as the collection of Rolf Röthlisberger, since 2021 in the Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Switzerland, the collection of Helmut Zambo, Germany/ Austria, and the Diamond Collection, Austria.

Selected works