A two person show was recently at ArtChowk Gallery in Karachi. Exhibiting their works at this show were G.N Qazi and Qasim Bugti.

Aasim Akhtar beautifully explains, “trees that successfully survive bitter wind in winters and severe yellow dust storms in summers harbour deep wounds in their hard barks. Qasim Bugti’s current suite of works starts from trees. The twigs of his trees and their texture stretch out to fill almost all the surface. The trees without their plentiful leaves appear as ‘the core of the object’ shorn of all their accessories. The tree, as it appears in Bugti’s work, is not a specific tree; rather it is a tree with universal, generalised and conceptualised features. The tree which can be seen in our daily lives reveals its secretive inner side. How can we have an insight into the veritable nature of any existence? What kind of a perception and skill should we possess to gain that insight?”

He further shares, “Qasim Bugti has set out to read the passage of time in the knots and veins of tree trunks, while marvelling at the intricacies of nature. And while he recreates the patterns that appear on the stump or on the meandering branches, he explores a forest of textures and hues. In timelessness, the wheel of birth and death, the round of emanation, fruition, dissolution and re-emanation is a fundamental theme of philosophy, myth and fable, religion, politics and art. Every moment of existence is measured and judged against the backdrop of this pleroma. But G.N Qazi’s paintings are not presumptuous of time as in eternity. They are of the hourglass of today, and they can sweep you to his temples and shrines of discovery with their sound and fragrance. In the mode of aesthetics, there are some expanses that connote a visual eternity. The brass bells in his work toll and resonate throughout his meditative spaces where the rose of devotion waits to be offered. The devotee in Qazi has tried to immortalise the ‘culture of the shrine by alluding to the panorama of eternity.“

An exhibition that forces one to think and ponder, like all good art should. A though provoking and poignant concept has been highlighted by both artists and they both do justice to it in their own ways.