11.08.2018-02.09.2019
Waseem Ahmed
Phase Transitions
Born in 1976 in Hyderabad Sindh, Waseem Ahmed grew up in a family who had migrated from India after the Partition in 1947 to settle in the newly independent state of Pakistan. Today, the artist is a key player on the scene of contemporary miniature painting and is part of a group of South Asian artists that use tradition as a means towards innovation.
Ahmed’s works reveal their complexity through their multiple reading levels and, beyond their esthetic, tackle social and political issues faced by the Islamic world.
Playing with metaphor and analogy, Waseem Ahmed’s repertoire is made up of elements that stimulate semantic reading. Combining traditional miniature techniques, such as gouache and gold and silver leaf on wasli paper, with experimental techniques, the artist creates works of great formal and iconographic richness.
Five years after Pious Fear, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Gowen Contemporary gallery presents today his new exhibition entitled Phase Transitions.
Seemingly dissociated subjects, such as sarcophages or female nudes made with acrylic on canvas, converge in the artist’s reflection on the ambivalent and sometimes monstrous aspects of human nature. The ornamentation of tombs as well as the women’s hair are transformed into a wasteland of transition between the reality of humans, their condition, their nature and their instincts, on one side, and their will to control, transfigure, sublimate, or even glorify, on the other side.
Image
WASEEM AHMED
Untitled, 2018
Acrylique et feuille d’or sur papier wasli
151.5 x 103.5 cm