Zahoor ul Akhlaq lived and worked in an almost indefinable space between modernism and post-modernism and grappled with concepts that traversed tradition and modernism. His was a time when notions of hybridity and pluralism were entering the lexicon of art and new trajectories were being discovered and explored, and influences, stimuli and effects were difficult to pinpoint with absolute precision. Akhlaq worked in the near absence of written or verbal ideologies perhaps because he was himself unravelling conceptual subjectivities and the internal rather than the theoretical was his pivotal concern.

Akhlaq’s use of the grid, calligraphic elements and tropes from the miniature tradition were mined from Islamic and local cultural sources but he took ownership of them and incorporated them into his stylistic, but more importantly, intellectual framework. He learned the rigours of calligraphy at the hands of master calligrapher, Yousuf Dehlavi. In England, he immersed himself in the study of miniatures through the vast collection at Victoria and Albert Museum. And he was well-informed in his investigation of geometric iterative pattering in Islamic art.

Thus all the signifiers of Akhlaq’s art that may be considered appropriations of Western modernism were in reality derived from a national heritage and collective histories — the planar colour fields or windows in the semblance of Reinhardt and Newman was a variation of the hashia, perceptibly broken to offer a path into the painting. The text-like forms are semiotic renderings of formal calligraphic alphabets, not Klee’s markings simulating children’s doodles. The artist re-examined the genre of miniature that had become archaic and irrelevant and encouraged students to revisit the tradition with fresh eyes.

Ahlaq’s cerebral approach to his own practice remains primarily undocumented and unexplored because visual experimentation was his focus and theoretical musings not his forte. Yet, he remains one of those artists for whom Western convention was only background study and his search for the authentic practice lay in the paradigms of his own culture.

It is no wonder then, that Pakistan’s most celebrated artists in the 21st century, Shahzia Sikander, Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Hamra Abbas and many others, all acknowledge Akhlaq as the principal influence in their work and the fountainhead from which all relevant postmodernist art and contemporaneity springs today. Perhaps no other artist has wielded this scope of influence on young practitioners in Pakistan. Zahoor ul Akhlaq transcends movements, eras and conventions to stand singularly tall.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 8th, 2015

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