Enigmatic, tangential and often spiked with elements of creative ‘madness’, Amin Gulgee’s sculptures invite speculation on the artist and his art. A curious mix of feverish applications, resourcefulness and calculated poise, his art practice may conform to the romantic notion of creativity from afar but the muse is not going to visit if intuition is not supported by endurance, discipline and persistence to work ideas through.
Welding, casting, chiselling, burnishing et al, the sculptor in Amin labours as much as he theorises and his current collection of sculptures, ‘Through the looking glass’, exhibited at the Amin Gulgee Gallery, Karachi, affirms this.
Three years in the making the works purport an overt familiarity as they are excavations from quarries Amin has mined repeatedly over the years. But, within the ‘Looking glass’ philosophy he negotiates new configurations with his established vocabulary. The mirror reflection, the see through look, peekaboo effects and gazing into infinity are some of the expressions that assemble the assorted pieces within his framework. Published in 1871, as a sequel to build on the success of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Lewis Carolls, Through the Looking Glass has remained a popular, intriguing and enthralling classic of Victorian literature ‘for children’.
Wonderland might appear to be a work for children, yet it has also been a source of interest and speculation for linguists, philosophers and generations of artists, including the Surrealists. In Carroll's book, Alice goes through the looking glass to find a world clear and recognisable yet slanted and oblique. As if awake in his own dreams, for Amin, ‘Through the looking glass’ is essentially a ruminative self-reflective state where he negotiates the personal and the universal through his mind’s eye.
A floor to ceiling installation ‘Char Bagh 2 falling leaves’, composed of molten foliage suspended in the air with invisible threads is structured within the Char Bagh, four garden grids. The seemingly pleasant walk through the pathways turns surreal as one peers into the chequered mirror floors and ceilings of each garden square.
A strong feeling of ascending /descending, as if through a miners’ shaft deep into an unending world of reflections, overpowers the senses. In this installation one senses the extraordinary power of artistic sublimation that Amin has been able to achieve through the looking glass.
When Alice discovers that she can step through a mirror into the “looking glass world” — she enters a land laid out like a huge checker board inhabited with living chess pieces and amusing characters from English fairy tales.
Amin’s mirror grids take inspiration from the checker board pattern. His floor installation ‘Cosmic chappati — the hunger game’, is a profusion of coiled bronze chappatis — circular discs fanning out like a bumper crop ready for harvest. Mounted on a chequered mirror bed to evoke the pawn checkmate effect the piece alludes to the power games that manipulate food crisis.
Two perforated bronze walls, ‘Rosetta stone’ and ‘Love letter’ spell out as Amin’s decree. Alphabets sliced through a bronze panel like a huge elegant stencil have light filtering in through the perforations and cuts. As filigreed oriental screens patterned with scriptural modulations the sculptural walls are yet another manifestation of his everlasting romance with the Arabic script.
In ‘Spider raga’ the artist welds single scriptural alphabets into a soaring vertical figuration like a humungous spider breaking into a dance.
Unmissable but also inscrutable two huge buffalo horns nestle majestically on black granite pedestals. As fresh additions they create a stir but here Amin is just hitting new notes — the tune has yet to evolve.
Sculptures in this collection are about healing and searching, not just outside of ourselves but within as well. Amin’s art practice is his coveted wonderland and rethinking and reworking are just part of the processes he employs to kick-start new ideas and new sources of inspiration, which are invariably close to other activities in his life.
Revisiting sculptures that he made as long as 10 years ago, and with the focus of gained experience, considering how they might be changed is a particular trait in his methodology. New versions grow from older pieces through changes of scale as he adds more repeated modular sections to some sculptures, or simply by altering the orientation of a work, turning it upside down or leaning it differently, supporting it on a plinth, perhaps introducing stone in combination with iron or bronze, the materials from which most of his sculptures are cast. This work ethos bears affinity to English sculptor Henry Moore’s belief that an artist should “reconsider and rethink” an idea. S.A.