11 April 2004	Sunday	20 Safar 1425

LAHORE, April 10: An exhibition of paintings by three artists from Karachi -- Ayesha Khan, Asim Butt and Fizza Saleem -- will open at Rohtas 2 (156-G Model Town) on Monday.

The artists will present at Dawn Together drawings that wind upto and down from their painting practice and bring their different thematic interests into dialogue through their shared formal concerns of form, space and illusion.

Ayesha draws on forms that appear in the exterior world while Asim and Fizza explore their own interiority as a mirror of the world they inhabit.

Ayesha depicts the lightness of things where Asim and Fizza show their weight. Yet they all give precedence to the corporeal as it appears in unified system of space over the superficial marking and manipulation of a surface to produce their images.

Through the exhibition, Ayesha and Asim will also embark on their project of evolving a collaborative oeuvre. Their collaboration is informed by a mixture of personal and art historical impulses: wrestling with their egos, engaging the revival of the miniature -- which has bequeathed to its modern progeny its Oriental fancy with embellishment but not its shared authorship -- as well as the awareness that the commercial visuals that dominate our cityscapes and television screens are products of team work.

But unlike the goods such images tout, the show documents the cross-fertilization and enrichment of process through a free exchange of ideas as the end to which the image thus produced is merely a means.