Shireen Kamran’s fascination with abstraction

The canvas of abstract art is wider than any other. One feels free to create different forms, shapes and compositions. It is quite difficult to create certain new forms and shapes, but composing and balancing them on the canvas is an interesting task. Even the selection and the balanced use of colours is a challenge for an abstract painter, particularly in making cubes.

Shireen Kamran’s fascination with abstraction resulted in recent works that reflected her observation, memory and imagination in a solo exhibition at Canvas Gallery, Karachi.

She has played with colours, focusing primarily on creating interesting shapes and lines. She has not used vibrant and pulsating colours instead used limited colours including red, blue, grey and ochre, with strokes of white, which were prominent in all paintings.

She painted soft, subdued abstracts. She used visual language of form, colour and line to create compositions which exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

She drew her arguments from diverse experiences, and reflected those experiences in the social context and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of our culture at present time. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable.

She enhanced his non-representational paintings by simple shapes and lines. The vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines along with various shapes create movement and visual effect in his paintings.

She mostly used colour and line rather than shapes to clearly define her abstract elements. She combined shapes and colours to achieve balance.

Her statement elaborated her work saying, “Energetic, vigorous and drifting lines infused with incessant mark-making along with alchemy of shapes and colours bring the paintings to life. Bordering on the historical and the contemporary, these works invoke the ancestral memory of life and the archaic forms of existence, thereby inviting the viewer to think beyond meaning.”