Qatar Foundation Set to Open Maqbool Fida Husain Museum in Doha

A new museum dedicated to Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain will open in Doha, with an architectural form that is loyally shaped after one of his final sketches. Scheduled to launch in November 2025, Lawh Wa Qalam: Maqbool Fida Husain Museum is based on an idea first drawn in 2008 and will be realised within , part of Qatar Foundation’s expanding cultural landscape.

Born in 1913 in India, Maqbool Fida Husain emerged as a pioneering voice in modern art and a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group. Over a career spanning six decades, his practice traversed painting, sculpture, tapestry, and film, continually reimagining form and narrative. Drawing from mythology, everyday life, and the shifting realities of the postcolonial world, Husain developed a visual language that connected Indian, Arab, and Western sensibilities, expanding the scope of modernist expression.
The museum spans more than 3,000 square metres, encompassing six decades of his work across mediums. Yet its significance lies as much in spatial composition as in curatorial scope. Conceived from Husain’s own hand, the building’s form engages directly with his methods of abstraction and fragmentation, translating the painter’s sense of rhythm and movement into architectural space.

Circulation moves fluidly between enclosed and open zones, encouraging an uninterrupted encounter with light, texture, and scale. The architecture resists monumentality, favouring instead a structure animated by process, a spatial gesture that feels simultaneously deliberate and improvised.

Internally, the galleries trace Husain’s evolving engagement with modernism and mythology, yet the layout resists linearity. Low ceilings lead into double-height chambers, narrow corridors open suddenly to voids filled with filtered daylight. Light enters through measured apertures, shifting with the desert sun and transforming the perception of colour across the works.
At the core of the museum, 'Seeroo fi al Ardh' (2009), Husain’s final multimedia installation, occupies a dedicated volume where architecture and art converge most directly. Sound, projection, and movement are orchestrated within a circular plan that evokes both performance and contemplation.
The building’s material language remains restrained, plaster, concrete, and pale stone modulate the play of shadow across its surfaces, grounding the structure in its environment without relying on overt symbolism. The architecture reflects Husain’s search for universality through form, rooted in context yet open to interpretation.