Ishtiaq Sandhu’s exhibition ‘Of Soul and Soil’ at the Ocean Art Gallery in Lahore marks the endurance of memory and a sense of belonging for an overseas artist who, once he breathed in the local air, wandered aimlessly around the busy streets and sipped from the broken brims of teacups at the local tea-stalls.

Like many others, Sandhu migrated and settled in alien lands. He selected Melbourne, Australia, as his new abode after finding himself in uncomfortable circumstances with regards to his art and life in Pakistan. Many other artists faced the same distress during and just after the Gen Ziaul Haq regime, owing to their art, expression, beliefs or ideologies.

Sandhu is a figurative or portraiture painter by instinct, who also presents at this exhibition his landscapes in this show — bathed in earthen colours, with an emotional sheen stretched across the canvas. The measured postures, fields articulated in subdued colours and an economy of paint creates an opaque transparency, which has become his signature style over the years.

Inaugurated by renowned artist Professor Rahat Naveed Masud, this exhibition presents a discourse, conceptual and psychological, to highlight the reciprocal relationship between the land and its people — in terms of history, persistence, migration and displacement.

An exhibition in Lahore, through portraits and landscape paintings, explores the relationship between the land and its people

The most striking frames of this show encompass ethereal female heads: they appear suspended in the unspecified space, tilted slightly or positioned horizontally to carry a sense of liminality and unconsciousness.

However, in one composition, along with the female face, the artist invokes the dandelion symbolically to infuse purity, innocence and hope while, in another, the vulture’s beak is employed as a metaphor for greed, lust and death. Moreover, the closed, ajar and downcast eyes of these portraits represent introspection rather than despondency and docility. In this way, these portraits also carry the socio-cultural and socio-political credentials traditionally associated with gender.

Sandhu’s training and education at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, immersed him in a strong landscape-painting tradition shaped by Khalid Iqbal’s modern realism and Zubeda Javed’s conceptual approach. Though his practice focuses on the human figure, his landscapes organise the environment that his painted characters breathe in or are linked with. In this way, his approach towards landscape-painting might be identified as conceptual.

These landscapes carry a distanced vantage point, without any physical presence of humans, emphasising their emotional presence through dynamic reds, dusty golds and thin water passages. The palette for these landscapes further evokes the Australian environment, as perceived by a Pakistani settler following displacement from his native land. The contemplative landscapes evoke the artist’s survival in a kind of wilderness, highlighting an asceticism that reflects his alienated assessment.

Materiality is another notable feature of Sandhu’s work, where he reveals raw canvas beneath the painted subject to advocate the thematic apprehension related to presence and absence. The flesh tones, earthen ochres, ash-grey to mauve tonalities subtly delineate the body from the soul. The artist precisely exploits material to achieve abstraction rather than directly distorting the form. The metaphysical features have been acquired through pigments, textures, opacity and translucency.

Arranged in juxtaposition, the frames containing faces and the canvases depicting the topography unfold an intimate geography of people and place through the playful layering of paint.

In this exhibition, Sandhu shares years of representing the artistic diaspora through a painterly language. The subtlety of his urge to articulate emotional and subjective states creeps across the coarse canvas. Unspoken and unheard thoughts knead Sandhu’s paints on the palette with tranquillity and endurance — the qualities that have crafted the artist’s persona over the years. Instead of having a verbal discourse with the viewer, the artist offers them the opportunity to absorb the components of his paintings through a patient and reverent gaze.

This collection of work serves as a reminder that the artist is a cartographer of perceived landscapes and silenced souls rather than a storyteller.

‘Of Soul and Soil’ was on display at Ocean Art Gallery in Lahore from December 20-27, 2025

The writer teaches Art History and Criticism at the University of Punjab in Lahore

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 18th, 2026