Exhibition of Raza’s paintings starts at Nomad Gallery

A solo exhibition of Karachi-based artist Mashkoor Raza started at Nomad Gallery (NG) here on Wednesday.

Over 35 oil paintings featuring fuming horses and semi nude women were put on display, giving an impression of ‘power and beauty’.

Mashkoor is a well-known artist, creating transparency with parts of basic forms of square, circle and triangle on his canvases and abstract images of women and horses; he shows versatility of handling his subject, paints and compositions. He creates aesthetic transparent impressions through which his images adopt varying shapes.

With 25 years of painting experience behind him, Raza figures prominently in the world of Pakistani art. The paintings also featured sun and moon. Mashkoor has maintained popularity at home and abroad.

He uses, in his work, different colours, primarily acrylic. Born in 1950, Raza has a long list of awards he received in the past year. The most recent one is the Presidential Awards for Pride of Performance, achieved in 2007. He has more than 20 solo exhibitions to his credit. He has participated in many group shows.

Raza, in his statement said abstract art perhaps was the only form of art that has minimum margin of creating critiques, because this is a fluent stroke work and only artist’s experience could tell its right or wrong.

Raza’s exceptional energy, combined with passion and patience, bring forth canvases, papers and boards decorated with fuming horses and silent nudes on the one hand and cool compositions with harmonious colours, on the other.

With the passage of time, his work has taken a few turns for the better. His dark colours are shedding a bit of their darkness, turning sedate and somber. Shapes of triangles, square and rectangles emerge softly and silently in their assigned areas. He defines the space, not through linear demarcation but through variation, creating shades in the given colour scheme. His white on white has been replaced with the beauty of painterly colour handling. His achievement of translucency creates a kind of delicacy and highlights poetic qualities.

NG Director Nageen Hyat said despite his spontaneity, Raza kept his fingers on the pulse of his viewers. She said, “It’s what Raza has always done: challenging our views through paintings.”

“Raza’s latest work is experimental, using various techniques and strong imagery. As for the glossy coffee table book, it offers excellent slides of earlier and recent paintings by Raza, along with rich and informative text,” Hayat said.