Word: akhlaq
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Dates: during 2010-2010
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...Pakistan, an alternative to the desiccated Pakistan that General Zia [ul-Haq] had tried to ram down our throats." Many of the artists in the book, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s, have trained or taught (sometimes both) at the school. Among them is Zahoor ul Akhlaq, a guiding spirit whose tortured acrylic A Visit to the Inner Sanctum 4 recalls the wide, flat planes of Matisse and Rothko as well as the framed spatial arrangements of Mughal illuminated manuscripts...
...Akhlaq was shot dead, along with his 24-year-old daughter, at his Lahore home in 1999 by an unstable roti vendor who also wounded Akhlaq's close friend and student Anwar Saeed, visiting at the time. Saeed's robust, homoerotic work shares his mentor's primordial vision. In swaths of deep blues and thick yellows reminiscent of Chughtai's watercolors, which themselves echo the primal Fauvism of Henri Rousseau, Saeed paints a semiclad man surreally clutching a large fish (The Principle of Delicacy). He also draws two men in romantic embrace, one with the fly of his jeans suggestively...
...Equally influenced by Akhlaq are Imran Qureshi's disjunctive, miniature paintings from his Moderate Enlightenment series, in which Pakistanis are shown doing everyday things. These gouache portraits, an old Mughal genre Akhlaq helped to revitalize, are seductively simple at first - one figure, apparently a writer of some kind, is depicted musing tranquilly beneath a tree with a notebook. But a closer look reveals his camouflage socks, suggesting he's no entranced poet but perhaps a scribbler of terrorist screeds...
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