The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art has just unveiled plans for an ambitious multi-site show with work by MacArthur fellow artists including Ndijeka Akunyili Crosby, Mark Bradford, Rick Lowe, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Fazal Sheikh, and Shahzia Sikander.
An internationally renowned artist from Lahore in Pakistan, Imran Qureshi is a master of the very delicate and the very brutal: combining tiny brushstrokes inspired by the 16th Century Mughal masters with large-scale installations evoking the carnage left after a bomb attack, his work has the power to shock and intrigue in equal measure.
An unlikely friendship connects him with Christian Louboutin, one of the world’s best-known shoe designers, whose trademark red-soled, beautifully crafted pumps are worn by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna.
For this programme, Christian meets Imran at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, a huge warehouse turned art gallery in Paris. It is the venue of a major solo exhibition, and Christian joins Imran as crates are unpacked and last-minute changes made to individual paintings and the exhibition as a whole, with some new work inspired by the bomb attacks on two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019.
“There is an element of violence in the work,” Imran says, “at the same time, when you get close to it, it becomes poetic as well.”
He has even brought a piece of his studio with him from Lahore, which becomes part of his installation in its own right – and as he and Christian discuss each other’s art, it emerges that these two creative giants have a surprising amount in common.
French Customs official Anne-Sophie Vitoux (L) hands over an artifact to a Pakistani embassy official at the Customs department at Roissy airport outside Paris on June 24, 2019. Photo: Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images.
Almost 500 stolen artifacts, many of which date back to 4,000 BC, were returned to Pakistan this week after being confiscated by French officials more than a decade ago.
The saga stretches back to 2006, when customs agents at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris intercepted 17 terra cotta pots en route to a local gallery. Though identified modestly at the time as being more than 100 years old, it turns out the relics were much older than that. Experts dated the pots back to the second or third millennium BC and determined that they had likely been looted from ancient burial sites in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
An investigation into the gallery in question—which has not been named publicly—turned up 445 objects in total, including ancient vases, busts, and goblets. Collectively, the artifacts are valued at roughly €139,000 ($157,000). French officials noted that the gallery will be slapped with a fine between €100,000 and €200,000 ($112,000 and $226,000) for trafficking in stolen goods.
The objects were returned in an official handover ceremony held yesterday at the Pakistani embassy in Paris.
