KARACHI: An exhibition of Annem Zaidi’s paintings titled An Ode to Motherhood opened at the Full Circle Gallery on Thursday.

Although both in art and literature motherhood has not been celebrated as much as it merits, there have been works of art and fiction in which creative people have made the character of a mother their focus of attention.

Maxim Gorky’s novel, Mother, comes to mind, which was later adapted by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht into a play. The story centred on the difficult life that a woman working in a factory had to lead. It had an obvious goal: to instil a zealous spirit in working-class people.

Zaidi’s tribute to motherhood is a little different. Her subject is the transformation that a woman goes through in an important time in her life — when she’s in the family way. The artist captures that transformation with all its aesthetic grace and poise. Even when it undergoes various phases, Zaidi depicts the female body with a great deal of insightfulness.

The medium that the artist uses is oil on canvas. And it does well for her purpose. The figures that she has drawn, albeit without the face (which perhaps suggests that all or most women experience the same emotion), have a certain luminescence to them that is seen when someone brims with a sense of fulfilment.

But then that’s not it. There are various stages to reaching that state of mind (or body). The artist divides it into pieces such as ‘Confessions in Private’, ‘Interlude’, ‘The Primordial Inception’, ‘Holding On’, ‘Undaunted’ and ‘Infused with Love’. These stages are logically connected and at the same time have an emotional appeal to them that leaves logic behind and celebrates matters of the heart.

The exhibition concludes on May 19.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2018