ISLAMABAD:’Tales of the Heart’, a solo show of paintings by Muhammad Atif Khan, has been put on display here at Tanzara Art Gallery to attract art lovers with unique imagery that serves both as treat of art and creativity.
“Atif has successfully got himself acknowledged at home and abroad. His work amalgamates Islamic miniature painting with modern geometric designs and popular culture.
“The artist successfully creates mysterious narratives through his juxtapositions of Mughal era figures within mandala-like landscapes,” said Noshi Qadir, curator of the gallery, in a statement.
“As a contemporary image maker, Khan pushes his artistic limits through varied artistic thoughts and visual explorations of socio-political and cultural issues. He created a unique visual vocabulary of visualizing stories,” Noshi said.
Atif Khan’s work has been widely exhibited home and abroad and is part of private and public collections worldwide. He got numerous prestigious international awards and also participated in workshops and residencies locally and globally, the statement reads.
Khan’s work has been part of collections at the ‘Bradford Museum’ UK, ‘Aga Khan Museum’ Toronto, Canada, ‘Sharjah Art Museum’ UAE and ‘Islamic Museum of Australia’ Melbourne, Australia, it further says.
He has several solo shows to his credit in Pakistan, UK, Jordan, Switzerland and India as well as participated in numerous group shows. In 2015, he won the Lahore Biennale Foundation’s Open Call competition and developed the monumental site-specific installation ‘City within a city’ at the Chowk Istanbul in Lahore, Pakistan.
Alongside his artistic practice, Khan is faculty member at the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan since 2005 and serving as assistant professor in the department of fine art.
“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 said.
To construct the compositions on the basis of his own storyline, he worked with fractions of existing or found images, created by others.
He borrowed 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, created using the archival digital print on Waterford paper, will remain on display till November 9.