KARACHI, March 4: At Chawkandi Art Gallery one normally moves clockwise. I decided to go anticlockwise and was amply rewarded when I saw arguably the best work on display at the joint exhibition by Naz Ikramullah and Amin-ur-Rehman, both Canadian nationals with roots firmly planted in Pakistan.
The Naz Ikramullah painting done in oil on canvas – ‘The ghosts around me’ – has a dreamy quality to it. The building, or shall we say a set of buildings merging into each other, are blurred and the figures are all clad in flowing white robes. They are ghosts, her near and dear ones, who have left her behind and gone to the next world. The only relatively clear figure – not in white, of course – is supposed to represent the painter herself.
The artist can be seen in other paintings done in the same series, one of which is another interesting composition. It’s a view from a room at the National Gallery of Arts. It’s again a semi-imaginative world with some kind of surrealistic effect. The lone clear figure is an art student. Maybe it’s the artist herself.
The one painting which recalls the trauma people went through in the wake of the mayhem that followed Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is ‘Hamara Karachi.’ Done in acrylic on canvas, it portrays blindfolded people walking aimlessly. Naz Ikramullah happened to be in Karachi at that time. In fact, almost like a migratory bird she comes to the subcontinent in winters and spends her summers in Canada.
The UK-trained artist is settled in Toronto where she teaches lithography, an art-form in oblivion which needs to be revived. Sure enough, there are two of her pieces in this genre of art, and to say that they are fascinating is to state the obvious. So are her computer-aided prints. She does paintings, scans them and then in Photoshop does through the machine what she can’t do manually. The end-result is beautiful.
Sharing the gallery with Naz Ikramullah is Amin-ur-Rehman, who is a mixed product of the art department at the University of Punjab, the National College of Arts and the University of Manchester, where he did a post-graduate diploma in curatorial studies. He has also been influenced by Ustad Bashir Ud Din, the master miniaturist, who is his father and from whom he has inherited, and who has honed his aesthetics.
Amin-ur-Rehman is as much of a craftsman as he is an artist. He is displaying a series of triple-hung vinyl texts of political slogans, media jargon and tabloid headlines. He has titled them ‘Final Hours: Is there an end to it?’
A socially and politically aware artist, Rehman has another meaningful installation. Titled ‘Market Values,’ it is a series of encaustic mixed media paintings which highlights what he calls the “icon of aggressive globalisation.”
Some paintings portray close-up images of a ship rendered with encaustic. Then there are industrial silos, which suggest industrialisation on a global scale.
His third series shows western dresses displayed on mannequins placed in show windows. The series portrays growing consumerism.
The exhibition of the works of the two Pakistani Canadians, who have both shown their works in different parts of the world, not without earning laurels, will continue till the 11th.
KARACHI, March 4: At Chawkandi Art Gallery one normally moves clockwise. I decided to go anticlockwise and was amply rewarded when I saw arguably the best work on display at the joint exhibition by Naz Ikramullah and Amin-ur-Rehman, both Canadian nationals with roots firmly planted in Pakistan.
