GALLERY GUIDE
Imran Qureshi
30 November 2019 - 9 February 2020 QUAD Gallery
Imran Qureshi is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Pakistan in the last twenty years. The exhibition in QUAD Gallery One highlights a wide-ranging practice that includes miniature painting, installation and video work. Complementing this, in Gallery Two, is the ‘Maktab Miniature Painting School’ featuring seven artists who were taught by Qureshi at the National College of Art (NCA) in Lahore and part of the first Maktab (‘school’ in Arabic) at the Lahore Biennale in 2018. Alongside a selection of Qureshi’s signature miniature works are examples of his gold and red/ violet canvases. The red in these paintings suggests acts of violence, yet were begun when Qureshi experimented with using parts of his body direct onto the canvas - such as a hand. The series When I thought of you, you were not there (2018) specifically highlights the death of a young Indian woman who was killed when attending a dance. Qureshi’s signature flowers that emerge from the red paint ‘…represent hope that – despite everything – the people sustain somehow, their hope for a better future’.
The large paper mountain titled The Garden Within (2019) is an installation made from 25,000 pieces of recycled paper. There are 6 images printed front and back on A1 sheets that feature variations of Qureshi’s flower paintings. The paper, crumpled and heaped into mountain-like structures, looms over the gallery viewer. In part this work commemorates soldiers from the Indian sub-continent who fought alongside and for the British in the First World War. However, Qureshi deliberately blends the black and grey in this work into mounds of green - highlighting a modern emergency: global warming and the climate crisis. Moderate Enlightenment (2006) and Standing Figure in Camouflage (2006) is a series of portraits the artist painted when he realised that after 9/11 the world insisted on segregating religious people. One form of segregation to which Qureshi points in his work revolves around choices in clothing or activities. He notes that ‘a religious person wearing camouflage socks is perceived as threatening, but in other cases, it is mere fashion.’ Dragonflies also populate many of Qureshi’s miniature works - creatures that the artist considers as the embodiment of freedom.
Also featured is the UK premier of two new video works that focus on everyday life in Pakistan. Taken from a series of films that the artist continually shoots on his iPhone around Pakistan, the work All is Smiles (2019) highlights the proliferation of cheap helium filled balloons of famous American cartoon characters. They float into view, seeminly omnipresent, with fixed, sinsiter smiles - cheap products flooding the world, form China. In contrast, the film Song of Silence (2019) is inspired by events in Kashmir. The tattered white flag, its remnants flapping silently in the breeze, echoes the silence that has descended on the Kashmir valley due to the current curfew. Imran Qureshi Biography Imran Qureshi (b. 1972, Hyderabad, Pakistan) lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan. He reclaims the regionally rooted discipline of miniature painting that flourished in the Mughal courts of the late sixteenth century, and transports it to the present day. His work constitutes a unique synthesis of traditional motifs and techniques with current issues and the formal language of contemporary abstract painting. Site-specific installation range internationally from the Sharjah Biennale in 2011, the inaugural exhibition of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto titled Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan in 2014, The God of Small Things at the Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum in Michigan and The Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. He participated in the Venice Biennale in the main show: The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni in 2013. During the winter 2014/15 Ikon Gallery in Birmingham presented a solo exhibition by Imran Qureshi, Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2013.Imran Qureshi is represented in the permanent collections of major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Acknowledgements With thanks to the army of volunteers who helped to make the paper mountain artwork The Garden Within: Hazael Hutchinson, Gill Frost, Jonny Hill, Rose Mifinie, Lauren Mifinie, Meg Mifinie, Penny Mason, Glenn Grant, Jean Davis, Emily Jones, Katie Petraitis, Diana Pinhao, Sarah Chaudhry, Ian McCaskill, QUAD Young Advocates, Students from St Martins School, and Horizons Sixth Form, and to QUAD Tech Team: Toby Richardson, Steve Ingman, Kristian Barron, Alex Fraser, Adam Crowther, abd Bradley Oliver-Lovell. QUAD would like to extend special thanks to Tommaso Corvi-Mora and his team at CorviMora, London, and thanks most of all to Imran Qureshi. Imran Qureshi is represented by Corvi-Mora, London and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.
Nation al Coll eg Imran Qures e of the Arts hi’s stu , Laho dents re work
National College of the Art Imran Q s, Lahore ureshi’s students work
Imran Qureshi,When I thought of you, you were not there All works 2019, Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London
Imran Qureshi, Moderate Enlightenment Both works 2006. Private Collection
QUAD GALLERY ENTRANCE
Imran Qureshi, The Garden Within Printed paper, 2019
Imran Qureshi, All is Smiles iPhone Video, 2019
Imran Qureshi, Song of Silence iPhone Video, 2019
Imran Qureshi Standing Figure in Camouflage 2005. Private Collection
Maktab Miniature Painting School
Imra n Plati Qures h c sh eet, i, Perfo rm acry lic p ance P aint, ie 201 ce 9