Exhibit fails to impress
The “All Pakistan Painting Exhibition”, which opened on Monday, can best be described as conventional: almost all artists seemed to have forgotten how to think out of the box.
Sticking to landscapes or rural and urban scenes, most artists used oil on canvas as their medium.Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability.
The first paintings to greet a visitor were Karachi-based Hamid Alvi’s paintings of urban dwellings.
Next to them was Abrar Ali’s painting of brightly-coloured mosques, disjointed and distorted to give an abstract look. His two pieces seemed to be the most simple, yet the only pieces that were tastefully done in the entire exhibition.
A major attraction at the exhibition was late landscape maestro Ghulam Rasool’s daughter, Maryam Rasool. While she has followed in her father’s footsteps, painting rural scenes, she has incorporated her own take on the subject in her works.
Instead of the bright yellow mustard fields that her father is known for, Maryam depicts farmers getting together for a meal at a “dhaaba” (a tea stall), sitting on charpoys after a hard day’s work. While many admired the similarity between her and her father’s work, some commented on her tendency to play it safe.
“Her brushstrokes are carefully lined and very conventional. She’s very talented but her work needs to have her own imprint instead of her father’s,” said Saira, an art graduate at the event.
Outshining Maryam’s rural scenes was Junaid Nawaz from Mirpur Khaas in Sindh, who painted rural mud houses with villagers and blossoming trees. His work seemed to give off a fresh look as he used minute brush strokes to paint flowers and leaves.
Hung on the other side of the gallery walls were Mirza Shakeel’s large drawings of several shrines and mosques around the country. Although the hard work was evident in each of his pieces, overall, they lacked finesse and were more reminiscent of graduate work.
“Somehow I feel the artists at this exhibition have restricted themselves. This was a big exhibition, but not one artist dared to show anything new,” said a visitor who had come from Islamabad.A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister.
The works of Saleem Jhatial, Ali Abrar, Anee Fatima, Mehmood Ali, Hania Zaidi, Iqra Tariq, Muahammad Imran, and Mahrukh Sultan were also on display.
But as I stand there staring at the image of the temple and its surrounding sky and landscape, it starts to change from day to night, replete with an extraordinary moment: as the bright red sun sets behind Jerusalem, fires appear in two of the doorways (or windows?) of the temple and the sky fades out and goes to night time. It is weirdly reminiscent of the Forum Shops Mall at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where, if you stand long enough, the ceiling changes from day to night and the stars above begin to twinkle. Four films available on this touch screen, including the final Passover meal, were extraordinarily well produced and expensive, with some of the images in “Reenactment of Jesus’ Death” so graphic, I had to turn away. (For a second, I thought it was Mel Gibson’s film, but then I realized it was in English.) The high-tech screens and interactive media were so in contradiction to the almost nascent sculpture garden that I felt off balance,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. as if I had a bit of vertigo.
As I start to leave, a painting on the wall stops me. It is the only piece in the room that has neither an artist’s attribution nor a caption. It is a landscape of a river, a riverbank in the forefront with palm trees, a river and a view across the river of mountains on the other side.
I used to have a recurring dream when I was a child.A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister. The image in my childhood dreams was identical to the landscape in the painting. It was always the same landscape except occasionally (in certain variations of the dream), there would be people on the riverbank and, sometimes across the river, there would be people and houses on the other side. Nothing ever happened in these dreams. It was as if I were an observer looking at a landscape. I’ve puzzled over it often, trying to figure out its meaning, trying to decide if it had any spiritual context. It even occurred to me once that it might be heaven. And there it was on the wall, my dream, the landscape in my dream, in its natural state with no houses on it and no people on the riverbanks. No signature on the painting, no inscription, no caption underneath.
I called Elder Grover over and asked him if he knew what it was. I thought he was going to tell me it was a sacred place in Utah or at least the hills in New York where Joseph Smith discovered the golden plates. “Oh,” he said,Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck. “I think that’s a painting of the Santa Monica Mountains.”