Lot 74: AISHA KHALID

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE UK COLLECTOR B.1972 TOGETHER Opaque watercolour on wasli 29 by 92.2 cm. (11 3/8 by 36 1/4 in.) Executed in 2006

Purchased from Corvi-Mora Gallery

Aisha Khalid is renowned for her intricate and dense patterning. Khalid studied at the National Collage of Arts, Lahore, where she developed and honed her technique for the meticulous and repetitive geometry that is carefully applied in her works. Within these patterns, Khalid imports her own vision of the feminine, incorporating softer touches around certain lines and borders. Khalid grew up in a conservative Pakistani society, and as a consequence, her work is cognizant of the suffering of women. Ideas of oppression and subversion are embedded within her intricate ornamentation. ‘Each setting of Khalid’s precious scenes conveys the claustrophobia of interior space through the tightness of its structure, […] the picture plane undulates echoing Escher and Mughal manuscripts simultaneously. Within it, a hidden female form is submerged wearing a burqa, becoming part of the fabric itself, enveloped and suffocated.’ (Salima Hashmi quoted in Virginia Whiles, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting, Tauris Academic Studies, London, 2010, p. 43)