Corporeal to Ethereal traces Abdul Jabbar Gull’s three-decade journey

The Koel Gallery is hosting an exhibition featuring the three-decade journey of Abdul Jabbar Gull in paintings and drawings. Titled ‘Corporeal to Ethereal’, the show will run at the gallery until June 14.

“The meaning and definition of ‘art’ kept changing for me,” the artist statement released by the gallery quotes Gull as saying. “From 1983 to 1989, as a cinema-hoarding painter, I used to think that anyone who could copy a photograph realistically was a great artist.”

In 1990, while studying at Lahore’s National College of Arts, he believed that anyone who could draw and paint a live model was an artist with good skills.

“I feel blessed that copying photographs and drawing and painting from life were never challenging for me. I could easily use diverse mediums and materials in my art practice, and I quickly learned the basic skills.”

He is not sure about the term ‘born artist’ and whether people are born as artists. He remembers that in his early primary classes, his teachers appreciated his handwriting, and his copies were shown in class as examples.

“Perhaps this appreciation led me to pursue art as a career. I also drew and wrote on the walls of my home, sometimes resulting in punishment for my activities!” Luckily, during adolescence, he had the opportunity to be in the company of people who discussed Sufism, spirituality and metaphysics. This allowed him to read books on these subjects at a very young age.

“I began asking myself some basic questions that every thinking and sensitive person asks: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where have I come from?’ ‘Why am I here, and where should I be going?’”

As these questions started haunting him, the answers gradually revealed themselves to him. The biggest challenge for him, from the beginning until the present day, is how he will translate these questions and answers into his art.

“I personally feel that we live in two worlds simultaneously: the physical and the spiritual. My entire art practice revolves around the feelings, observations and experiences of these two realms.”

In the current exhibition, he has attempted to share his 30-year journey, addressing issues and questions about the outer world, which is easier to explain than what one experiences in the inner world.

“Dil darya samandaron doonghay / Kaun dilaan diyaan jaanay hu,” he quoted 17th-century Punjabi Sufi mystic, poet, scholar and historian Sultan Bahu, and said it means that in the spiritual realm, only you know what you experience. “The awe leaves you speechless, and the ecstasy and joy happen within yourself.”

As a visual artist, when he tries to share that experience through lines, colours and forms, he realises that the more he tries to say the more remains unsaid and untold. “Thus, the journey continues.”