Group exhibition: Art show featuring sculptures, miniatures starts

Fourteen art pieces are on display until September 19.

LAHORE: Group art show, Dear Reality, featuring sculptures and miniatures started at the Taseer Art Gallery on Monday.

Fourteen pieces by Shahzad Ali, Raza Bukhari and Idrees Hanif made using resin, fiberglass painted with mud, carpet, archival print, engraving on zinc plate, wood and mixed media are displayed.

Zaineb Siddiqui, curator at the Gallery, told The Express Tribune the title of the show hints at paradoxical implications.

“On one hand, it can be read as a whimsical address to a complex phenomenon as a living being; on the other, it highlights the dearness and preciousness of reality itself. The work on display talks about the duality of concepts that we engage with in everyday life, be it images from popular culture, homely ornate decorations or functional objects.”

Sculptor Shahzad Ali said, “Each structure has its foundation based on its past. The possibility of the former influencing the latter is rather undeniable. The strength of my work draws from a traditional ornamentation production house. An expertise, passed onto from father to son; it is an experience of space, modifying the substance for storage.”

Sculptor Idrees Hanif said he was interested in manipulating objects to evoke personal experience, fuse the relationship between art and life, reality and invention.

Raza Bukhari said his work spoke about the power of religion in the contemporary world and how it had been used and manipulated accordingly.

“The Islamic patterns used in my paintings symbolise Islam, and the unfinished and blurred ones represent the molded religion created by people, in the present society. I was brought up in Iran,” said Bukhari.

“In The Simpsons series, I have tried to use some irony, depicting reality in a lighter and funnier way. A harsh reality curtained behind these funny images.”

He said the pieces titled New Born was a diptych.

The two pieces differ in their material and talk about orientalism. I have experimented and explored different mediums like photo transfer, gouache on vasli, digital and archival prints, metal, and each one speaks its own language. Likewise, the triptych carpet series show the change of meaning just by the substitution of the material used,” he said.

The show will continue until September 19.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th, 2014.