Eight female artists to display paintings

LAHORE:Royaat Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Lahore Literary Festival, has organised a group exhibition by eight brilliant female artists rooted in the subcontinent and spread around the world, at 21-Z Ghazi Road DHA, from 25th February to 10th March, 2019.

The exhibition, Curated by Saulat Ajmal, will feature seven new paintings, eight sculptures and 19 works on paper which explore themes of love, life, metaphors of home and the multi-dimensional task of being a woman in today’s world, through abstractions of the human body, play of materials, repetition and evocations of sacred iconography.

The exhibition will be on view at 21-Z Ghazi Road, DHA Lahore from 25th February to 10th March, 2019.

Somewhere in the humdrum of life the individual voice gets lost and muffled. What irks her, where love is found, what all hats she wears and where at the core of her she yearns to just ‘be’. This individual experience and concern feeds into the collective conscience of what it means to be alive and not just be categorised according to social roles and constructs. The need for her individual voice to exist is as prescient today as it ever was. Fatima Saeed’s geometric images depicting “Charbagh”, and baby clothes, referring to ideals of heavenly gardens and home to meditative works by Aisha Abid with repetitive writing and mark making, expanding on ideas of love and loss. Delicate depictions of fruits and vegetables take anatomical forms to serve as metaphors for the female body and ideas of femininity and forbidden sexuality in Unaiza Ismail’s drawings. Originating in subjective experiences, Unaiza’s playful works abstract the most intimate elements of the human anatomy into shapes that reappear frequently throughout art history.

Natasha’s intimate portraits of spaces as you remember them and not just as seen depict an idea of how a space becomes home and lives on in our memories surpassing physical time. This is also the case with Shireen Kamran’s redefining and reiteration of an object of familiarity and comfort that reappears as a living, breathing and moving presence through her ephemeral layers of paint and expressionistic strokes.

Of the selected works Rabeya Jalil’s energetic bursts of colours and various combinations of colour, shading, and forms allow us to indulge in her experiences and move through a plethora of shifting images as we try to find ourselves in her work and make sense of her experiences as an individual moving through the world. She builds layer upon layer of paint, scraping and adding as she goes, making the process of painting itself come alive and an experience in and of itself.

The sculptural works of Masooma Syed and Zaineb Siddiqui, their playfulness with the material is obvious in their unconventionality. Cartons picked up from their surroundings for their candy colours and for their ready availability and images in resin that exist in our surrounding with the endlessly expanding and constructed urban city, the artists create with an urgency that gets dictated by the mood of the material itself. As they morph and layer their images the ideas of spaces being created and a stage being set hovers in your mind. Ready for an act, the pieces sit and wait to be explored in their translucency and play of internal light forcing the mind to wander through.

With eight artists speaking of their experiences of life and the process of making, the works defy a broad stroke social construct or an umbrella term to describe them all. The works stand for their individuality and yet they all speak to each other on a level that’s deeply personal.