Written by: Nimra Khan
Posted on: June 21, 2019 | 
| 中文
Maharaja with Flower by Imran Qureshi (L), Usama Bin Laden by Mohammad Ali(R)
A common critique levied at the Pakistani art world, especially art institutions and students studying within it is that we do not honour the masters of the art world. We are taught Western art history, and through admiration and imitation of Western ideals we develop a confused form of aesthetics. Meanwhile, our own artistic icons are ignored and our local art history is threatened with erasure. However, it is difficult to fault institutions and young aspiring artists for this dilemma, when few books and even fewer museums and national art collections exist, through which we can read about and become familiar with these iconic artists and their works.
A recent show at Canvas Gallery, curated by Hameed Haroon, provides us with such an opportunity to view important works by renowned Pakistani artists, all under one roof. The works are part of Rehana and Shakil Saigol’s collection, which they have been fervently collecting for decades since they were teenagers. In the accompanying text, Rehana talks about the act of collection as an addiction, and that at a certain point it begins to feel like hoarding. It was then that the owner of Canvas Gallery, Sameera Raja put forward the idea to sell a few of them. “It is very exciting, because you never get to see all these important works in real life, because we have no museums you see,” says Raja, “You have works dating as far back as 1952 (the piece by Ustad Allah Bux) and then Muhammad Ali’s piece from 2013, and all these iconic artists in between...”
It is interesting to see the diversity of imagery and styles change with each period, creating an interesting microcosm of Pakistani art history. We start from Allah Bux’s Untitled Landscape, with gouache and ink washes rendered in a kind of a cubist style, and then Anna Molka Ahmad’s large, violent brushstrokes reinterpreted into striking pastel portraits on a black background. Moving into the 80s, we see serene landscapes by Mian Aijaz ul Hasan, Zulqarnain Haider and Khalid Iqbal, executed with realist techniques.
Nahid Raza and Sumaya Durrani’s works from the 90s make use of more contemporary techniques to talk about important issues. Durrani’s work, Untitled (Diptych), addresses feminist concerns of the treatment of women in the art world, and the way the female body is displayed and portrayed in art pieces. Imran Qureshi’s Maharaja with Flower from the late 90s is a side of the artist not frequently seen in his paintings; it is different from his signature red splashes and closer to the contemporary miniature art form in its formative years.
From here onwards, the works become a bit more contemporary and we see paintings by artists like Naiza Khan, Quddus Mirza, Anwar Saeed and Waqas Khan who use provocative imagery, minimalistic styles, and questioning of mediums and genres. Quddus Mirza uses mixed-media for his piece and his childlike painting style speaks for itself, while Naiza Khan redefines drawing as a medium with her deliberately careless strokes as a way to deal with the politics around the female form. Anwar Saeed’s Red Net Captives – 4 is a provocative work similar to that of Raza and Durrani. It also seems to deal with similar issues of gender politics and societal constraints through the medium of photography and the image of a male nude and a bright red net dupatta.
A lot of the works by major artists retain their modernist language even in the 21st century, with artists like Noorjehan Bilgrami, Jamal Shah, and Moeen Faruqi, whose works from the early 2000s are immediately recognizable. We end with two large-scale hyper-realistic works by Muhammad Ali, executed with the romantic realism of Flemish paintings, yet talking about current global political issues. Particularly notable was a painting inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Death of Marat’, with Osama bin Laden as the radical who died in his bathtub.
Through these works, we can mark a rough trajectory of Pakistani art history and its evolution over the years, as well as take a peek at an extensive and precious private art collection. It makes one wonder about the importance of an art collector for the artist and the art world at large. It also puts into question an art collector’s ability to act as a kind of a visual historian through the works they choose to acquire over the years.
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