Waqas Khan continues to impress Artwallaa and the rest of the world. This article is a little dated but still wanted to post it in case you haven't seen it.
Source: The Guardian - Jonathan Jones on art - BLOG
Source: The Guardian - Jonathan Jones on art - BLOG
Waqas Khan: my art discovery of the year
There is cosmic majesty in this artist's sensational geometric works, and they've changed the way I think and see and live
The Breath of the Compassionate, 2012, by Waqas Khan. Photograph: Waqas Khan
It was only at the end of 2013 that I encountered my artist of the year. Waqas Khan showed a work at the Frieze art fair this year but, I'm sad to say, I missed it in the hubbub. It was only when I saw his sensational, visonary art in the Jameel Prize at the V&A that I fell head over heels for an artist who reveals the unstable contours of all things.
Waqas Khan makes drawings that start as tiny precise circles and expand, circle by circle, to become vast fields of shimmering light and shade. He spends long hours hunched over big sheets of paper accumulating networks of dot-like marks. Every one has to look just right, and he mustn't spill any ink.
The fascinating thing about these ethereal abstract drawings is the tension between precision and freedom, discipline and chaos. Because every detail is done by hand and with the naked eye, each little constituent part is different. The patterns are mathematical and geometric and yet organic, unpredictable, flawed. Forms constellate and fade. There's a sense of cosmic majesty, as if we were observing an abstract vision of the birth and death of the universe.
Waqas Khan: Jameel Prize 3 from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.
Khan says his work is about love. When he was a child in a village in Pakistan, he would listen to village elders tell stories of Sufi saints. To him, the great quality of these saints was their universal love. He also says his art is an attempt – partly inspired by the Sufi tradition – to take people out of everyday life for just a few minutes and reveal some other plane of existence.
In other words, here is an artist who matters because he is trying to change how we think and see and live. Working in Lahore, he creates a truly global art whose abstract liberty is ecstatic and compelling.
Late in the year, Waqas Khan made me see again. He showed me that art has a purpose in the age of science and technology, for his magic geometries give life to the universe.
Waqas Khan makes drawings that start as tiny precise circles and expand, circle by circle, to become vast fields of shimmering light and shade. He spends long hours hunched over big sheets of paper accumulating networks of dot-like marks. Every one has to look just right, and he mustn't spill any ink.
The fascinating thing about these ethereal abstract drawings is the tension between precision and freedom, discipline and chaos. Because every detail is done by hand and with the naked eye, each little constituent part is different. The patterns are mathematical and geometric and yet organic, unpredictable, flawed. Forms constellate and fade. There's a sense of cosmic majesty, as if we were observing an abstract vision of the birth and death of the universe.
Waqas Khan: Jameel Prize 3 from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.
Khan says his work is about love. When he was a child in a village in Pakistan, he would listen to village elders tell stories of Sufi saints. To him, the great quality of these saints was their universal love. He also says his art is an attempt – partly inspired by the Sufi tradition – to take people out of everyday life for just a few minutes and reveal some other plane of existence.
In other words, here is an artist who matters because he is trying to change how we think and see and live. Working in Lahore, he creates a truly global art whose abstract liberty is ecstatic and compelling.
Late in the year, Waqas Khan made me see again. He showed me that art has a purpose in the age of science and technology, for his magic geometries give life to the universe.
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