Kohari’s Colour Clout an Exhibition of Paintings by MASOOD KOHARI

Kohari’s Colour Clout
Exhibition of Paintings
by
MASOOD KOHARI

on Wednesday 21 March, 2012 at 5:30 pm
the Exhibition will countinue till 28 March, 2012
Daily 11:00 am to 7:00 pm

Citi Art Gallery
M-19, 20, Sahi Promenade Apartments, Bloc-3, Clifton,
Karachi – Pakistan.



Masood Kohari’s creative multidimensionalism; enjoys a distinct exception from his senior contemporaries in the fact that he has succeeded in producing perceptively experimental work in paintings, drawing, ceramic class medium and sculpture in the last fifty years.
All these art forms have been done justice in terms of different levels and categories of experimentations, graceful in his artistic quality and innovative in freshness.
“To arrive at a considerable range of success in experimentation with newer materials is not an easy thing. It is so when one is in working with fire to produce a tile painting that tests and challenges one’s grasp of the colours and chemistry in highly dicey, tricky and uncanny situation of rapidly changing heat ina kiln”, assets Kohari. He has produced over hundreds of glass paintings to satisfy his consuming passion to play with fire as he plays with cool colour tubes on his canvas.
Over forty years of having lived and worked in France has shaped a distance – defining dichotomy in his vas body of artistic endeavours and relating himself with the people of Pakistan.
This often rattles and risks him when he displays his work after a gap of years. Kohari’s present panorama of creativity is limited to paintings, colourful and well executed as they are, there is a telling absence of his fire paintings which he has exhibited last year in Islamabad and Lahore after completing his fresh work in kilns in Gujranwala and Gujrat, basically his early nurseries.
The City Art Gallery in Clifton has persuaded Kohari to produce only canvas paintings for his solo show which demonstrates his skills and colourist clout of dazzling reach is treatment and refinedness. He has chosen to use masks and faces to compose images which will certainly transport his old followers to early sixties and seventies when Kohari was beginning to play and even experiment with reds, pinks and blues. And of course in deptly designed lines and female form to express his sense of figure stetching. Seeing Kohari in Karachi with fresh paintings provides a rare delight when one considers that grant fertility of his youthful talent had a bloom and bright ideas and burning passion for colours, lines and images are so distinctly Koharisque.
The earth shaking events of present day Pakistan has also given the existential pain to him that defines some paintings, aply entitled “Blast” and “Dhamaka”. These paintings, in subdued but moving hues, also contrast and move the viewers in some black and white colours, showing crows in “Conflict”, “Confiracy” and “Disciples”.
There are mostly small 3×2 works with some 4×6 frames which are large and good enough to show that Kohari is a colourist in his experimental fashion.
These two large works display a net of the fisherman of Karachi, caught in the struggle for survival. Kohari’s net is a common symbol exhaustively harnessed in his glass paintings and in colourful and amazing figuration in tehse big pieces. Which dominate the solo show.

(Muhammad Jami)

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