ISLAMABAD: Celebrating its seventh year of efforts to promote art, Gallery6 is hosting an art bazaar featuring some 1,000 artworks on Saturday.

The two-day event will provide an opportunity to the students from different art colleges, fresh graduates, emerging talents and established artists to bring their artworks and sell it directly to the art lovers.

According to Dr Arjumand Faisal, the curator of the show, it was hard to characterise the kind of work being displayed because of the sheer amount of diversity in form, composition, concept and technique of every piece.

“You will see a number of paintings, both realistic and surreal, rendered in beautiful and vibrant colours. The paintings are in oil, acrylics, watercolour and mixed mediums. They have realistic, figurative work, landscapes, works in expressionism, surrealism, abstracts paintings – all dealing with either aesthetics or various personal, social, cultural or political issues,” added Dr Faisal.

Realistic paintings explore the themes of life with truthful and accurate depiction that contemporary life offered to the artists.

They paid attention to accuracy of detail and colour. Figurative works are in different styles, depicting a wide variety of treatments. Landscapes present refreshing scenes of rural areas of Punjab with glowing colours of mustard, surroundings of Lahore city, areas around Islamabad and city scenes from Karachi and Lahore. Some are dreamy and surrealistic. They depict varying technique, treatment and styles of different artists.

Dr Faisal explained how abstract paintings were both small and large scale compositions, done with acrylics, oil, water colours or effects of chemicals on gold and silver leaf.

These compositions have interesting surfaces and textures. They are vibrant and aesthetically pleasing, demonstrating the attempt of pulsating spirit in revealing itself.

Film art paintings are also included in the art bazaar such as cinema billboards with their dazzling images that used to be part of the popular culture of major cities in Pakistan.

Their enormous scale, bright colours and melodramatic imagery was used to excite the public.

Gallery6 said the visual power of these fantasy billboards was integral in building the public’s fascination with film stars for nearly five decades. The exhibition has film art posters of Madhubala, Shah Rukh Khan, Shabnam, Saima, Rani, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Lorene and many other leading film stars.

Besides a fascinating collection of Pakistan and Chinese calligraphy, drawings, prints, sculptures, carvings, photographs, decorative mirror works, ceramics, terracotta pieces, etc, the art bazaar also has a large number of unconventional sculptures and prints. The prints are done in multiple techniques, including wood and linocuts, aquatints, monochromatic prints and so forth while sculpture pieces, made of different mediums like diyar wood, fiberglass relief, terracotta and clay will also be on display. They range from small table size to seven feet and depict human forms in variable styles, unique to each artist.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2015

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