KARACHI: Very few artists manage to come up with a visual language of their own. And rarely anyone is able to create their own idiom. Ayessha Qureshi is one of them who have done that. An exhibition titled Between Light — A Midcareer Retrospective that’s under way at the Koel Art Gallery is ample proof of it. But before that, some basic information about the artist, which will put things into perspective.

Qureshi is self-taught, and as those who run the gallery will tell you, she received early training in art from educator Nayyar Jamil. Now this self-taught aspect is extremely important. Why? Because it implies that your wish to learn art is uncoloured by ideas transmitted into your brain by others. This also means, if you are instinctively driven to a certain field or born with the ability to excel in it, technique becomes synonymous with practice. The primary thing is to translate your ideas into art, or better still, to tell stories that you want to tell in a medium that suits you best.

Interestingly, Qureshi picks one of the most difficult subjects to express herself: the spatial characteristic of existence. In easy words, what we all do or how we deal with space. The artist is now experienced enough, the retrospective reminds us, to put her reservations and assertions across because her visual idiom is now readily communicable. Space, mind you, should be considered as a multidimensional metaphor, which is to say, the artist is interested in many things one of which is the almost unperceivable gap between, in musical terms, the notes A and B — the journey that one undertakes between two concepts, two ideas, two thoughts. Qureshi’s visual language helps the viewer get to that point. Be it the movement of geometric shapes or the play between black and grey, or the sudden drop of a line, they’re so distinctly placed that the viewer knows where to pick the story she’s telling and where to let it go.

The exhibition concludes on Feb 4.

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2020