ISLAMABAD: A solo show of paintings by Muhammad Atif Khan concluded here Monday at Tanzara Art Gallery featuring traditional imagery made with modern techniques.
The show titled “Tales of the Heart” served the art lovers with unique imagery that combined treat of art and creativity. Atif’s work captured amalgamation of Islamic miniature painting with modern geometric designs and popular culture of Mughal-era figures. Through his work, the artist created mysterious narratives mandala-like landscapes, said curator of the show.
The artist has successfully got himself acknowledged at home and abroad. As a contemporary image maker, Atif pushes his artistic limits through varied creative thoughts and visual explorations of socio-political and cultural issues. He visualized stories to address the soul searching process. Atif’s work is part of private and public collections worldwide. He got numerous prestigious international awards and also participated in workshops and residencies locally and globally.
“I developed my visual vocabulary and imagery on the lines of popular visual culture of Pakistan, which is a blend of Central Asian and Persian aesthetics with a local South Asian blend where storytelling is an important feature to express the thoughts. So, when I create my work using the juxtaposition of images of diverse and contrasting environments in one space; it subverts their original contextual meaning and suggests new stories, which generally revolves around the social, economic, political or historical realities but in a subtle way, just like sugar-coated pills which are sweet from outside but bitter from inside. The use of Mughal iconography in my work expands the time zone of my canvas, from the present day to a few hundred years in the past, which help the viewers to free their minds from the limitations of the real time and to enter into an imaginary world,” the artist says about his work.
To construct the compositions on the basis of his own storyline, he worked with fractions of existing or found images, created by others. He borrow these fraction of images not only from Mughal miniature paintings but also from the famous ‘Pakistani truck art’ and all type of printed materials i.e. books, posters, currency notes etc. It is a kind of recycling of images that suggests new meanings to the viewers. The paintings are created with the medium of archival digital print on Waterford paper.