There has been a fresh stirring in the breeze at the Karachi School of Arts Gallery, Karachi. To celebrate the advent of summer Rabia Zuberi, the grand duchess of Karachi’s art schools and art world, decided to hold the third annual faculty show in the spacious hall on the second floor of the KSA.

Here, the visitor got a glimpse of the works of 17 faculty members who collectively put up 40 exhibits. It was a case of teacher turning artist. The portfolio was simple and uncluttered and easy to read.

Normally I wince when I plough through artists’ statements in brochures as they often contain high falutin philosophical gobbledygook. I have a sneaking suspicion that the management at the KSA have been reading my previous art reviews because on this occasion I could understand what the artists were trying to convey in their mission statements.

The exhibits had an unsullied informality which was refreshing. I noticed that all the canvases had titles. This is a practice that Babar Mughal, a hardcore existentialist who believes life has a citrus-lined sense of the absurd, used to assiduously avoid.

Trained as a graphic designer and one of the most talented artists to have emerged from the KSA, he didn’t give his works titles on the ground that this took away some of the mystique of an intimate experience.

The exhibits were quite dissimilar and did not follow any particular theme or motif. It was rather like listening to modern Jazz which sometimes can be atonal, and sometimes harmonious. Each teacher had his or her own little supernova which somehow had to fit into its own solar system. I spent an equal amount of time before each picture, absorbing its meaning, importance and implication. But after I had completed the round I returned to Sheema Khan’s startlingly beautiful double etching in black and red, which was absolutely riveting. She called it ‘Bas kar rukh amn ka’. It was the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

Shagufta Ashraf’s linocut featured a gargoyle in black and white with an all-seeing eye and a bulbous nose. Abid Hasan’s screen print entitled, ‘Gamut’, did look rather like a swarm of. bees leaving the hive. The religious collagraphs which evoked a spirit of reverence belonged to Asma Faraz. It the visitor wanted to enter the Kingdom of Narnia all he had to do was to stare long enough at Bilal Mahmood’s etchings, ‘Warp and weft’. It was rather like listening to the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Have you forgotten yet?... For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days. Fariha Nadir’s collagraph is a very intricate work. If won’t take the visitor long to spot two eyes with rather long eyelashes enclosed in thorny foliage. She didn’t give the composition a title.

Hameed Ahmed’s etching takes the onlooker into a completely different world. Madiha Khan’s collagraph, ‘Safavids’, concentric fantasy is quite fetching, Mona Noor’s sketches were meticulously crafted especially the one which portrayed a man’s brooding meditativeness. While Naheed Afridi produced a bit of fantasia, the kind that was popular in Victorian England complete with swing and foliage, Rabia Zuberi produced her own symmetry with her etching entitled, ‘Human existence’ which consisted of a clutch of stalagmites and stalactites against a night sky. There was more, lots more.

Rafi uz Zaman Zuberi came up with a parchment in Urdu and Raheela Abro’s monoprint, ‘Bina-unwan’, was quite an outstanding work. Her portrait in sepia of a bald-headed man enmeshed in wire was marvellously involving. Romila Kareem’s etching of a hand decked with sunflowers made me wonder if a fortune teller was involved; and Sadaf Sajid came up with a collagraph of a classical female dancer in a classical Mughal setting. A bist of Umrao Jaan?

And last, but not least, there was the etching by Surraiya Jabeen, ‘Genesis’ depicting wheels within wheels and in the epicentre a human figure with outstretched arms and folded legs as if about to pirouette into space. In a sense this astonishing picture summed up the ethos of the exhibition—creativity at its most experimental. Perhaps I should stop visiting this gallery because every time I do I end up buying a few paintings.