Group show of drawings opens today

Islamabad : ‘The Autonomous Draughtsman,’ a group exhibition featuring nine Pakistani artists who share an affinity with drawing in various forms and expressions, opens at Tanzara Gallery here today (Friday).

“The exhibition aims to link and forge close connections between artists by exploring their creative ideas and energies, allowing the viewer to explore the immense diversity in contemporary drawing practice. While some artists’ practice is based on conventional modalities using drawing in preparatory ways, other artists test the limits of what defines a ‘drawing’ pushing beyond the conservative boundaries, making way for hybrid processes to be employed,” the gallery’s director Noshi Qadir stated.

Curated by eminent art critic Aasim Akhtar, the exhibition features Anas Ghauri, Babar Gull, Bilal Khalid, Farrukh Adnan, Huma Iftikhar, Huma Maqbool, Imran Mudassar, Rehana Mangi, and Ramsha Rubbani. The show highlights artists who employ conventional drawing processes as well as those who move across disciplines using drawing as their foundation with an emphasis on investigative and exploratory ways.

“Drawing has always been an artist’s most fundamental skill. Traditionally, the teaching of any visual art discipline has relied heavily on its practice. Good drawing skills allowed artists to grasp and order the reality around them. At the turn of the millennium, however, there was a general impression that with computers, scanners, digital cameras and image software becoming widely available, drawing would dwindle into a marginal activity. In fact, the opposite happened. This renewed enthusiasm for drawing is not unrelated to what is happening online, as artists are benefitting from a previously unconceivable wealth of visual source material. Drawing can do what no image software can: it can read your mind,” the curator Aasim Akhtar explains in a written statement. The exhibition offers 42 drawings, and will continue till February 28.