Twelfth Paper on Modern Art
Imran Mir’s Twelfth Paper on Modern Art executed between December 2013 and February 2014, consists of 28 paintings and 8 installations. The works are an interesting mix of his usual trajectory of color explorations and intense black and white discoveries. They are implemented with the precision that has always been a trademark of Imran Mir’s technique, evident even in his large-scale pieces.
The installations that accompany these paintings are a natural outcome of the geometries that Imran Mir expresses in his two dimensional works. Some installations are a series of ready-mades which he then re-contextualizes.
Imran Mir’s paintings are conflations of expansive spatial color fields containing cosmic objects executed with the repetition and meticulousness often found in Islamic geometrical patterns, paradoxically coupled with the freedoms of American expressionism. Mir toys with all the metaphysical and ontological concepts that he was concerned with and could not express in his commercial output. There is a playful charm in his work that alludes to the childlike exploration of truth. The controlled chaos of his immense canvases is indicative of the lens through which he viewed the universe, the world and his life. He seized the liminal spaces and painted them, lived them.
Written by Nafisa Rizvi
