Pakistani artist Fahd Burki’s latest show in Dubai, simply titled, New Works, marks a shift from his vocabulary of graphic, anthropomorphic symbols and forms, towards abstraction. The contemplative compositions feature grids, lines, geometric shapes, repetition, symmetry and blank spaces. The artist has used a soft, pastel palette to make barely visible marks and light washes in his acrylic and pencil paintings on paper, to express a range of emotions. The paintings evoke a sense of transience and permeability and have a mystical feel.
Burki was born in Lahore in 1981, and graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2003. He received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2010. Since then, his intriguing paintings and sculptural installations have been exhibited at prestigious galleries around the world. He won the John Jones Art on Paper Award at Art Dubai in 2013. The same year, he was also among the ten international artists selected to do a research based residency at the Edinburgh Printmakers for their project, Below another Sky, developed by Scottish Print Networks.
“I have been wanting to move to abstraction for some time now, but could not free myself from the figurative forms, even though they were quite fragmented in my last show. But in this new series the abstract language just came naturally, because I changed the way I work. Rather than starting with any preconceived ideas, I worked more intuitively and above all tried to slow things down. I began with a simple grid, which helped me to organise my feelings, and then intuitively added marks, which are mostly washes of diluted acrylic paint inside the graphite grids and lines. In many of the paintings there are translucent dots superimposed on the grids and floating freely without adhering to the order and rigidity of the grids. This kind of disruption is a new element in my work. The pale palette I have used is also new for me. I wanted the colour washes to be absorbed into the paper, and look almost like tones of the paper itself,” Burki says.
The titles of the paintings such as Beautiful Day, Elation, Dawn, Noon, Winter’s End and The Way Things Are offer some clues to the inspirations behind them. “These paintings are deeply personal and emotional. They are inspired by nature, by sunsets, sunrises, the colour of the sky and the earth at different times of the day. But rather than capturing a moment or scenario, the idea was to express my response to it. I hope the simple titles will provide viewers with an entry point into the works. I do not want viewers to look for meaning or narratives in the works, but rather to feel the emotions expressed in them,” Burki says.
The artist, who is known for painting on paper, has also done some paintings on canvas in this series, marking his return to canvas after over a decade. “I did these works on canvas because I wanted to create some large scale works to express feelings of elation and rest. Unlike my earlier work, this series has no social or political agenda, hence the show is simply titled New Works,” he says.
New Works will run at Grey Noise, Dubai, until July 30
