Recently, artist Amber Arifeen exhibited her artwork at Alliance Française, Karachi. You! takes a look...
art
Recently, artist Amber Arifeen exhibited her artwork at Alliance Française, Karachi. You! takes a look...
Painting exhibitions are always a breath of fresh air for art lovers. This is because each artist has his own unique style and every painting has a different story to tell. The charisma behind the art work lies in the concoction of thoughts and experiences of the artist that become evident in the art work. Art is made special when the artist puts his or her life experiences, and thoughts and perception on to paper.
The world today has evolved a great deal and apart from technological advancements, the mindsets of people and the way the society is structured has also experienced a change. However, at one point, these two aspects clash and make one wonder if the world we currently reside in is at the verge of falling apart. That is the question that artist Amber Arifeen poses in her work ‘The Crisis of Woman’, exhibited recently at Alliance Française, Karachi. Read on to find out more about the artist and her exhibition...
Amber Arifeen is a self-taught painter, based in Karachi. She started painting when she took AS level Art at Lahore Grammar School. Even though she went on to do her undergraduate degree in Development Studies from UC Berkeley, USA, Amber continued to paint, as it was a form of art that allowed her to speak to the world.
Amber has managed to gain popularity due to the unique images she creates on the canvas. Her experimental series of work has also been displayed at My Art World Gallery, Islamabad, which is an online art gallery for established and emerging contemporary Pakistani artists.
About the exhibit:
One might wonder why the artist decided to focus on the negative aspects of the advanced world but the truth is that we can’t run away from the persisting problems of the 21st century. Sooner or later the threats we tend to sweep under the rug will be too enormous to ignore. Among them is the world of the internet that has lead to the creation of applications such as Facebook, Twitter and other social websites.
Interestingly, Arifeen chose women as the subjects of her paintings and closely examined the traumas and identity crisis that women face on a daily basis. “My work portrayed women in their candid settings, an environment that was constructed out of domestic objects and their elusive emotions; anxiety, hope and despair,” shared Arifeen.
The paintings, created with oil and charcoal, were aimed to examine the internal strife that exists within women to search for a higher purpose in life while battling the stigmas of society.
The paintings demonstrated women in domestic settings; places where they are alone and can truly express the pain they are going through. For instance in one artwork, we saw a woman curled up on her bathroom floor. The artist did not paint faces and kept the emphasis more on the positioning of the bodies, which showed more emotion than one could decipher from facial expressions. After all, feelings of despair exist in one’s mind only. In another of Arifeen’s paintings we observed a woman lying lifelessly on a chair with her face covered with a cloth. The use of black and white hues and dearth of bright colours in the artwork also lend to the gloomy mood that the artist has aimed to create. And while the images created were simple in nature, they still managed to connect with the audience.
Amber Arifeen surely possesses the art of beautifully depicting the realities of life through her paintings. Her work was definitely an eye opener and managed to touch the hearts of all those women who fight different battles on a daily basis.
