April 18, 2008	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1429

KARACHI, April 17: With the opening of new galleries in Karachi and a greater demand for art, there has been a spurt of exhibitions, thus making the art scene more vibrant than it ever was.

The two shows running currently in Clifton are quite different from each other. The one at Chawkandi features the paintings of Mussarrat Mirza and Meher Afroz, both portray their spiritual journeys in their individualistic styles. Their colours are subdued and themes mature. But at the City Art Gallery, where Amber Aslam continues with her series ‘Goldfish in my aquarium’, the emphasis is on beauty and colours – mainly red, orange, blue, purple and yellow. The different hues of these colours merge into each other without losing their identities. In depressing days like the ones that we are passing through Amber Aslam cheers us up in no uncertain terms. It’s amazing that even though she paints just the goldfish she is not at all monotonous, which is perhaps because of the wide spectrum of colours on her palette.

Amber’s medium of choice is oil, whether she works on paper or on canvas, and her prices are quite reasonable. The Sukkur-based Mussarrat Mirza also uses oil on canvas but her colours are dull and there is haze or, as she says, dust that covers the dome, the staircase, the flying pigeons and everything else. She denies that they are cityscapes. She calls them her spiritual journey. She is well within her right to term her canvases what she thinks they are.

Senior artist Meher Afroz continues with her Poshak series. “It’s nearing its end,” she says. The dresses are done in graphite on paper and acrylics on canvas. But all compositions prove that drawing – the mother of all visual arts -- is her forte, which explains why one is not surprised to learn that she teaches the subject at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.

Her other paintings present the violence and the uncertainty of our times. She paints arrows and nails and at least in two of her works, she also shows panic-stricken faces. In one composition there are flowers too for she thinks that even in darkness there is sometimes a ray of light. There can be no two opinions on that.—AN