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n October 11, the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, paid a long-due tribute to Mussarat Mirza. Although the Fine Arts Committee of the Council described her as a “renowned artist,” it is difficult to encapsulate the quiet and self-contained maker of images in such a general term.
Mirza was born in 1946 in Sukkur, where she still lives and works. She taught from 1971 to 1999 at the Department of Fine Arts, Sindh University, Jamshoro, and from 2001 to 2008 at Studio Arts and Crafts, Sukkur, thus training and influencing generations of artists. Yet, surprisingly, Mirza is not as widely known as an artist of her stature deserves to be. A monograph on her art and life was recently published by Koel Gallery, coinciding with her retrospective at the gallery in 2022. Last week’s public session was a form of homage to the artist and her contribution.
In the past, Mussarat Mirza held solo exhibitions at Chawkandi Art, Karachi (2011 and 2008); Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2006 and 2002); Rohtas 2, Lahore (2008); and Rohtas Gallery, Islamabad (1985 and 1983). However, her name is not frequently mentioned in art academia or the art market. The most significant reason for her marginal position in public art circles lies in the nature of her work. Mirza’s sophistication in handling imagery, ideas and material is rare; she can aptly be called a painter’s painter.
There may be other factors too. The first is her place of residence: Sukkur. Removed from the glitter of the Laho-Kara-Islo art scene, it remains the essential source of her sensitively rendered surfaces and a key to understanding her aesthetics. In the hegemony of Lahore and Karachi, and to some extent Islamabad, other cities – including Multan, Bahawalpur, Peshawar, Quetta, Hyderabad and Sukkur – are scarcely mentioned. Against this backdrop, the courage and clarity of the artist must be recognised and commended: she chose to paint in her own studio, close to her environment and her heart.
Another concern – one that her contemporaries and art commentators often face – is how to categorise her work. It would be a mistake to label her simply as a landscape painter, even though she studied at the University of the Punjab, where she was “not directly taught by Khalid Iqbal.” Yet, as she recalls, “Mirza maintained a lifelong bond with the master artist, remembering his early encouragement of her work.” According to Mirza, “Khalid Iqbal was really a modern painter. His ‘realism,’ if one must call it that, was of a different order to pictorial depiction.”
In Mirza’s work, too, when one identifies traces of reality – the suggestion of a terrace, the outline of a corridor, a slit of light in a darkened interior, rubbed-off sections of a structure, a diffused neighbourhood or a fragment of fabric on a pole – another reality begins to emerge. This second reality invites the viewer to think beyond the tangible, and therefore temporal, world.
The world visible in Mirza’s canvases mirrors her personality: unambitious, unassertive, and unconcerned with recognition. She has pursued her distinct vision for more than five decades. Her paintings and drawings – earlier work with hints of human figures and discernible forms, later with increasingly faint details – envelop the viewer in a spiritual, metaphysical and transcendental atmosphere.
It is a feeling any artist can recognise: the stillness of the studio, where light filters through windows, paints and brushes lie within reach, and the blank canvas waits on the easel. From this quiet environment, what ultimately emerges on the surface is the artist’s vision – a fusion of external observation and inner experience, rendered in a way that is entirely intuitive and uniquely her own.
“What is seen in her work leads the viewer to look beyond the visible.”
An artist, in that sense, is a translator – one who converts a text from one language into another. Yet, as all writers, translators and readers know (though seldom admit), two texts can never be identical. Each is original in its own right, carrying the distinct texture of its language and representing a separate system of thought. The translator – often the least acknowledged – plays a crucial role in reshaping the work.
As Gabriel García Márquez remarked in his Paris Review interview: “A good translation is always a recreation in another language. That’s why I have such great admiration for Gregory Rabassa… I think my work has been completely re-created in English.” In another interview, he even claimed that Rabassa’s English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the original Spanish.
Similarly, painters – particularly those who draw on existing material to create their work – operate much like translators, balancing a bridge between two worlds. This is evident in the art of Paul Cézanne, who, in the solitude of his studio, would gaze upon the same motif – most famously Mont Sainte-Victoire – and produce 81 versions of it in paintings and water-colours. When standing before the work, one is not merely seeing a view from the south of France, but something that exists between Cézanne and nature.
A similar phenomenon can be found in the landscapes of Khalid Iqbal, who painted fields, skies, trees and the occasional mud house – usually not far from where he lived. One recognises the indigenous trees, the hazy patches, the layers of green and the water ponds, but beyond these depictions of nature, one senses the heat, the air, the atmosphere – abstractions that lie beyond the reach of the eye.
Mussarat Mirza belongs to this lineage of painters. Over the years, her imagery has freed itself from earthly bounds and seems increasingly to levitate. What appears to be a dust storm, a blazing hour or a streak of light against a murky background – all drawn from observation – are, in essence, metaphors. The transformation, or translation, in Cézanne’s art is formal; in Iqbal’s landscapes, spatial; and in Mirza’s work, perhaps spiritual.
Though these three artists belong to different generations, they share a defining trait – one common among many creative practitioners: a preference for solitude. Whether in their studios or out in the open, their work reflects an independence of mind and a profound focus, grasp and command of their subject.
In that context, it hardly matters whether one of Mussarat Mirza’s canvases depicts an interior, another bears faint traces of human figures, or others feature receding houses – all ultimately convey a meditation on a diminishing reality. It is a paradox: what is seen in her work leads the viewer to look beyond the visible. A similar experience can be found in the art of Mark Rothko, whose layered fields of colour draw the viewer into unfamiliar, unexpected and almost invincible realms. The quiet contemplation that Rothko’s surfaces demand is also required by Mirza’s canvases.
This phenomenon is not bound by time, age or any prior knowledge. It invites a universal response. I can attest to this personally. The first painting I ever saw – sometime around 1970 or 1971 – was by Mussarat Mirza. I was a nine- or ten-year-old wandering through her studio. In my memory, the painting showed children and adults gathered around a bullock cart. Seeing that same work (Untitled, 1969) reproduced in her recent monograph, after half a century, was a moment of wonder. Her studio, her solitude and her seriousness must have inspired that ordinary schoolboy to follow the path of art – and, years later, to write these very lines.
The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, acurator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted at quddusmirzagmail.com.