Summer art show opens today with works of four artists on display

Islamabad
Nomad’s summer art show opens today (Wednesday) with an exquisite collection of paintings by Mashkoor Raza, Samina Ali, Tayyaba Aziz and Ubaid Syed. The gallery’s summer art shows of the past used to be mega-events with more than a dozen artists represented. This time, however, only four artists have been featured in the annual show, probably because the gallery’s director is out of country.
Mashkoor Raza is a senior artist with a diploma in Fine Arts from the Karachi School of Art. The gold medalist is an established signature in figurative abstract. He is known for creating transparency with basic forms of square, circle and triangle as he makes abstract images of women and horses.
Mashkoor is inspired by the solar eclipse so he mostly paints the moon and the eclipsed sun. His creative artwork has been awarded; the most recent recognition that he received was the Presidential Award for Pride of Performance. He has had many solo and group shows at the national and international levels.
Samina Ali has always been interested in the harmony between space and form, with collages and calligraphy woven together. “Being closely associated with Islamic history, it’s hard to imagine myself not using the long-lost stories which are enclosed in books or museums. To remain in touch with the past is to keep history alive; lost images in time resonating through a flow of vibrant colours and textures,” she mentions in a statement.
Samina believes that the hardest task is in inventing a pictorial language that would convey a personal way of seeing things, while at the same time discovering what the personal vision is. “My aim is to stress rather than disguise the objective quality and the aesthetic autonomy of the work: initially at least, the response must be to what it is, not to what it is about,” she added.
Tayyaba Aziz describes herself as a figurative, abstract expressionist and analytical cubist. “Oil on canvas, I experiment with analytical cubism by detaching it from monochromatic expression to bring more life to it. My work brings together, the human form to reproduce in separate pieces of prism. I use thin layers of colour that cover my subject’s body, making it free and floatable; the space is activated with overlapping colours, tones and patterns that tune up the imagination with visual ambiguity,” the artist explained.
Tayyaba said while our culture and society teach us to hold back emotion when in public, “I personally believe emotion should be expressed more regularly and freely. Colours play an extremely important role in my paintings, making them more decorative and intense. My work is the expression or application of imagination,” she defined.
Ubaid Syed, who studied Fine Arts at the Karachi School of Arts, focuses on nature. He works with Acrylic on canvas. To him, the essence of art lies primarily in artistic generalisation and not in representing reality in its concrete form (impressionist). His paintings are a combination of metaphors and random feelings. Ubaid lives and works in Sweden.
The exhibition will continue till July 11.