PRESS RELEASE*
GROUP SHOW
Figurative Pakistan
November 21 –December 8 2007
Opening Reception, November 20, 6-9pm
Aicon Gallery in London presents Figurative Pakistan, an exhibition featuring the work of four highly renowned Pakistani artists: Ijaz ul Hassan, Naiza Khan, Ahmed Ali Manganhar and Sana Arjumand.
Displayed together the works provide an introduction to the many themes and debates circulating within Pakistani thought and cultural output of the last 40 years. Political unrest and cultural, religious, social and national identity are just some of the issues explored by these artists, whose work responds to a country and society that in all respects is rapidly transforming.
While at least a generation older than the others in this exhibition, Ijaz ul Hassan (b.1940) has made an enormous contribution to the development of contemporary Pakistani art, not only as a painter but also as a teacher, art critic and political activist. His work of the 1970s (for which, in 1977 during General Zia ul Haq's Martial Law, he was arrested and put in solitary confinement) is considered to have established a new trend in Pakistani painting, using the natural world and colour symbolically with which to express his political concerns. In addition to recent paintings, three famous works from the 1970s will be displayed at Aicon, including his seminal 1974-5 piece, The Rifle Butt.
Educated at both the Wimbledon School of Art and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Naiza Khan (b.1968) has exhibited widely across Europe, South Asia and the USA. Unshadowed by the memory of colonial rule, her output covers a wide variety of media, exploring female identity and, more closely, society's view of the female body in both Islamic and Western tradition. Working against cliché and taboo within the Eastern and Western traditions, she utilises objects such as the female corset (reproduced by Khan for this exhibition in galvanised steel) to highlight the ruptured understanding between female identity and female subjectivity as determined by a paternal tradition.
Painting in acrylic on canvas, board and slate, the work of Ahmed Ali Manganhar (b.1974) reassesses one of the cultural legacies of Colonial times: the genre of 'Company' painting. Company painting was a market for landscape and daily-life scenes that emerged for Westerners during the heyday of the East India Company. Manganhar assumes its technique, yet chooses to reinterpret the genre's subject matter from a Pakistani (rather than Western) perspective. In doing so the artist highlights how the native Pakistani had to adapt in order to understand and reproduce this new vocabulary of seeing and thinking; a vocabulary that eventually became widely credited as being the father of modern Pakistani expressive painting.
Sana Arjumand's (b.1982) paintings and mixed media canvasses explore 'the set-up of society, social responsibility…confusion of identity, the role of religions vs. culture and the constant dilemma of being the "young, modern Pakistani female"'. Frequently employing symbolism, most notably elements from the Pakistani flag, to express notions such as national pride or political oppression, her work expresses the artist's dual response towards her Pakistani identity: her pride and belief in her nationality and cultural heritage twinned with a desire to embrace the modern world, and her frustration with those whose actions and ideas might hinder this.
Please Click the Links Below to Download the Artist Bios
Ahmed Ali Manganhar Bio. PDF
Ijaz ul Hassan Bio. PDF
Naiza Khan Bio. PDF
Sana Arjumand Bio. PDF
For further press information and visuals, please contact
Rhiannon Pickles on rhiannonpickles@mac.com Tel: +44 20 7096 8809 / mobile: +31 6158 21202
Aicon Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 11am to 7pm.
Tel: +44 20 7734 7575 / email: london@aicongallery.com