Arts & Lifestyle

CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE – PART 6/6

Pakistani Female Figurative Artists Series

These women are the ‘joie de vivre’ of the Pakistani Figurative Art Scene.


By Anum Lasharie

With great pride, I present to you 6 female artists who are changing the narrative and shooing away the cultural stigmas attached to figurative artistic expression in Pakistan.

These 6 brilliant artists who will be introduced to you over 6 individual features, ignite a unique dialogue, ripe with debate and controversy. Challenging love, angst, and society, with awe-inspiring abandon.

Welcome to the last (part 6/6) of our series of introducing some of the coolest female figurative artists Pakistan has to offer.

Maria Khan

Maria khan is a Lahore based visual artist. When you view her work at first glance you see these female characters in unusual settings having an unnerving gaze, caught in a moment that is not in sync with their clothes or their bodies. These women bare their grotesque figures in dream-like settings exposing their bodies, emotions and desires. These emotions range from love and longing to lust and anger and come out on the canvas in the form of fantastically drawn figures. These figures appear on the canvas with deformities; showcasing larger-than-life, scandalous characters, big-bosomed mature women who sit comfortably in their corpulent flesh and fancy clothes, in their secret gardens of roses, shrubs and berries with their pets, something is delightfully wrong yet very close to real life about them.

Khan’s work is a journey in exploring woman’s inner nature, including her; visualizing the more disturbing aspects of the self. I feel that these figures somehow depict themselves in a rather grotesque manner probably because these are characters from my part of the world, where women are taught from an early age to suppress their desires and feelings. These women are an antithesis of all that is expected of a woman in my culture; regardless of their age and shape, they are comfortable in their skin.

 

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