Art works across a wide spectrum
By: Anil Datta
Karachi: There’s absolutely no shortage of art galleries in town to cater to the art buffs’ tastes and many of these display stuff which can be pretty weird, in the name of modern art, abstract art, and what not.
However, not so with a very refreshingly varied exhibition running currently at the Koel Art Gallery, Clifton, refreshing in that it encompasses myriads of schools of art, from realism to total abstraction, from the most refreshing of sights to the most weird, from surrealism to plain realism.
The 21 exhibits are an exercise in diversity.There’s an acrylic-on-canvas by Ali Azmat, titled, ‘Looking Forward’, and the work does complete justice to the title. It shows a pretty young girl clad in a scarlet T-shirt leaning against a solitary tall, stately palm tree with a really expectant look in her eyes, as if she were longingly waiting for somebody. The expectant look in her eyes really embellishes the radiance of her face. Ali Azmat deserves all the credit for having made a subject otherwise as simple as that so profound and alive.
From the sublime, we now come to the weird. The weirdness is exemplified in Shahid Rassam’s “Anticlock X” a horned, demonic figure with light blue eyes on a humanoid body. It is supposed to convey the whims and the ravages of time. However, one has to resort to mental acrobatics to figure out for himself as to what the artist really had in mind when he painted that figure.
It is a real anti-climax to the work immediately preceding it, “Looking forward to”. Such is the variation in the nature of the exhibition. It caters to all tastes. There are two Mughal miniatures, Mashq-III and Mashq-IV, a novel innovation, Tea stain, pencil on paper, by Naveed Sadiq, meticulous indeed.
There were also some versatile works based on religious verses and religious themes.
One of these is semi-impressionistic, depicting a vast expanse of greenery, tall trees, and in their midst, an elderly man performing Wazoo (ablution) prior to offering his prayers.
There are two abstract works by Ayesha Qureshi titled, “The desert I and II”, and just through mere shading, no images, she adroitly depicts the starkness of the desert.
The exhibition has been titled, Summerscape, as it is an annual summer feature.The show runs up until Eid.
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