Solo show: Exploring connections with nature

Exhibit featuring work of Sweden-based artist underway

LAHORE: How to Disappear Completely—an exhibition featuring the work of Sabah Ingvarsson—is underway at Taseer Art Gallery.

Over two dozen pieces by the artist are being showcased at the show. Ingvarsson has used a bevy of mediums including Indian ink, acrylic paints and clay board in her work. The artist, who originally hails from Islamabad, obtained a bachelor’s in visual arts from the National College of Arts and currently resides in Sweden.

“I have been working on the theme over the last few years,” she said. Ingvarsson said she had been left awestruck by the amount of nature that surrounded her in Sweden when she relocated there 11 years ago. She said nature had always appealed her, even when she was based in Pakistan.

“My father was a horticulturist so I was always surrounded by trees, plants and birds,” Ingvarsson said. At risk of voicing a clichéd thought, she said she had been greatly influenced by nature and felt everyone was inextricably linked to it.

“I have been playing around with the idea of how so many things that become part of our persona come from nature,” she said. Elucidating, she said roots could be seen as veins while lungs and bronchi could be viewed as tree branches.

Ingvarsson said she liked playing with the idea as it merely lent credence to the view that one was a great part of their surroundings and whatever they did was reflected back onto them. “Nature can survive without us but we cannot survive without nature,” she said.

Ingvarsson said she had a liking for colour. However, she said she felt this most profoundly when seeing the work of others. Most of her own work was in black and white colours, she said.

She added it allowed one to see things with greater clarity. “If it is black and white—like an x-ray—one can separate things and not be overwhelmed by a riot of hues.”

Gallery proprietor Sanam Taseer said the artist’s work was akin to Rorschach tests (a psychological test to assess personality traits). “It consists of dreamlike starlit canvasses with mysterious organic elements that speak about the universality of human experience,” she said.

The exhibition will conclude on February 14.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2016.