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Zahoor ul Ikhlaque in Pakistan Directory

 

A brief history and biography of Zahoor ul Ikhlaque and his paintings. Also included are a few articles written by his contemporaries and an obituary by Ardeshir Cowasjee. The act of painting is one of the ways to manifest, adorn and celebrate the experience of life in its gaiety and pain. for me it is a necessity to excavate, unravel and recompose the contextual iconography of being. A Visit to the Inner Sanctum is a series that relates the man to man, and the man to the environment. It is not a comment or a description, it is just a page from a scrapbook noting things from the past and the present. The process of living initiates a mode of expression in sharing with things past and present, in day-to-day xistence. Painter, sculptor and printmaker, Zahoor ul Akhlaqs work - standing between tradition and contemporaneity - consolidates his research into the many visual traditions that criss-cross the political and geographical boundaries of Pakistan. He looks into the discipline of Islamic geometry, the iconography of the Moghul manuscript, the well-worn genres of European painting as manifest in the British colonial heritage and the complex business of being an artist of today; feeling, recording, communicating. He moves with ease between these different compulsions; his references multiply, synthesise, appear and submerge themselves in the discreet handling of his medium. As a young child he watched the famed calligrapher Yousaf Dehlavi, a friend of his fathers, work in Karachi. Thus a respect for skill and a familiarity with order were internalised at an early age. The uprooting of his family and the migration from Delhi to Karachi at the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 also left its emotional scars. The nostalgia and the sense of separation which underlies Akhlaqs work is gently pervasive. His travels to different parts of the world have reinforced both the rootedness and the contemporaneity in his work. Much of Akhlaqs earlier work has involved an exploration of the canons of art-making in the sub-continent and the inferences which accompanied the advent of Islam in the area. The spatial order is arrived at by moving around a rectangle within a rectangle, suggesting an Imperial Firmaan (decree), the page of a manuscript, or the courtyard in a Mughal palace. The inner and the outer are in dialogue, each a foil for the other; the border and the picture poised in delicate equilibrium.

 

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