MONA NAQSH: RECENT PAINTINGS by Zoe Papademetriou

For their final exhibition for 2009, Twelve Gates Gallery is featuring recent paintings by Mona Naqsh, an accomplished Pakistani painter whose father Jamil Naqsh is considered to be the only living Pakistani modern master artist. Mona Naqsh received no official academic training in painting and instead studied underneath her father, developing her personal aesthetic in an environment that gave her free range to explore and understand her visual interests.

Contemporary Miniatures of Pakistan: ISBAH AFZAL

Tangled IV

By Virginia Whiles

Strands and filaments and fragments. A scenario of interrupted sewing, as if the maker has lost the thread and is longing to be drawn back into the story. These works disturb the viewer by their very fragility so that to contemplate them might even prolong their dissolution. Yet what exquisite textiles are being woven here with the brush! To embroider with a qalam (fine squirrel-haired brush) is to evoke the notion of representation: at once describing the role of the sewer/weaver and enacting her practice, perhaps in the sense of mimesis whereby the performance empowers the actor through identification.