KARACHI: What is it in a figure that makes artists go mad about it? There can be many answers to the question, but the one that seems more plausible is hidden in the title of a four-person exhibition, ‘Figure in Movement’, which is under way at the Unicorn Art Gallery.

It’s the ‘movement’ of figures — in the form of a changing posture, an altered expression, a continuing gesture — that the artists can highlight or underplay to drive a point home. Let’s elucidate the argument: Noori Berdi makes her characters or figures gel with her swishing strokes and a reasonably generous use of colours so much that it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish if the women in the acrylic-on-canvas artworks are moving along with the brush strokes or the swirls are trying to inhabit them. But then, there are flowers, a sign of nature’s bounty, which keeps things in perspective helping the viewer realise that each element should be understood separately.

Indian artist Ashok Bhomik creates figures, female figures, which appear to be frozen. They’re not. It’s their sense of isolation that gives that impression.

The birds and floral aspect in the mixed-media-on-paper exhibits reveal that the moment in which the artist has captured the images is an ongoing one.

Farazeh Syed studies faces (oil on canvas). Sullen faces. It’s the eyes, more than the sadness the figures are shrouded in, that give away their stories. And the stories are well-documented. We’ve been hearing them for a long time and they don’t seem to end.

Abrar Ahmad crams his canvas with images but keeps the all important figure of a woman at centre-stage. There’s text, there are fine lines, there are birds, there’s historic ambience… and yet the epicentre of his ideas is the human form.

The exhibition will end tomorrow (Saturday).

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2014