Unver Shafi Khan

Abstract

Unver Shafi Khan is a contemporary artist from Pakistan. He graduated with a double major in studio arts and English literature from Kenyon College, Ohio, USA, in 1984. He is known for his sumptuously painted small and large-scale biomorphic forms resembling humans and animals. Khan’s artistic career, spanning over four decades, indicates his keen interest in English literature and art history and a continuous exploration of the relationship between colour, texture, form, and space.

Biography

Unver Shafi Khan was born in Karachi in 1961. He received his early education in Karachi and completed high school at Cadet College Hasan Abdal, Attock. In 1984, he graduated with a double major in Studio Arts and English Literature from Kenyon College, Ohio. Khan’s keen interest in English literature and the company of poet and scholar Frederick Turner (b. 1943) at the English Literature department encouraged him to take English literature as his major. Khan wrote his undergraduate thesis on the American poet, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). His years at Kenyon helped him become well-versed in the canon of Western art and art history. Khan’s study of English literature and art history profoundly influenced his artistic thought processes and worldview. Later, upon his return to Pakistan, he developed a keen interest in traditional Indian painting.

In his earliest small-scale pen and ink drawings from his student years in the US between 1980-84, he explored mark-making in his carefully and meticulously drawn dots and lines with black and white pen and ink on paper.

After graduating from Kenyon College, he returned to Pakistan in 1984. He set up a studio in his grandparents’ house in Karachi. To earn a living, he worked for an advertising company as a design director while keeping up with his art practice. As a young emerging artist at age 25, he convinced Syed Ali Imam (1924–2002), a seminal modernist artist and gallerist, to exhibit his solo show at the Indus Gallery Karachi. The works in the exhibition contained his small-scale, meticulously rendered drawings on French Sennelier paper with pen and ink and large-scale oil paintings on canvas, exploring abstract expressionism. These large-scale works frequently evolved from his tiny pen and ink drawings.

Khan’s artistic journey has continuously explored colour, form, spatial tension, and mark-making through various mediums. In the early 1990s, he continued his exploration of oil paints and moved away from pure abstraction. His earlier heavily textured and complex drawings were reduced to abstracted minimalist forms such as the back of half-female nudes, painted with a monochromatic palette of blues, greens, and reds. He created the series called After the Miniatures, based on his close study of the traditional Indian paintings and works of Abdul Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985). Khan was inspired by traditional Indian miniature painting. Still, he invented his syntax, translating it on a much larger scale with oil paints. The centrally situated ambiguous familiar forms were composed on the picture plane as one giant form, showing Khan’s strong sense of design and creating tension.

In the mid-90s, his pen-and-ink drawings continued to evolve. He started incorporating coloured inks and pencils and simultaneously working with oil paints on large canvases that included more referential objects such as animals, plants, and non-objective forms.

In 1996, he created shamianas (wedding tents) and burqas (head-to-toe female coverings), reflecting Khan’s acute consciousness of surface treatment by applying oil paints in several thin layers. By the late 1990s, he added acrylics on canvas to his medium in a more exploratory way while continuing with his dots, which have been part of his artistic journey throughout.

In early 2000, Khan painted a small-scale Fabulist Series using vivid colours. The surfaces were adorned meticulously with an infinite number of his signature dots and short strokes, using various drawing tools such as reed and drafting pens, quills, brushes, markers, and pencils, bearing jewel-like embellishments and celebrating the two-dimensional surface as if made meditatively. The series also harks back to his tribute to traditional Indian miniature painting. He created many more works in the same trajectory and, besides titling them individually, called the works ‘In Fabulist Style’, as it became a style for him.

Khan’s artistic practice on a smaller scale abundantly displays his command and passion for colour and texture, and his large-scale works depict his command of soft rendering. The organic forms he employs can be read as expressions of sexuality. The narratives of his works are drawn from local arts and crafts traditions and fables from literary and imaginary references. Khan comfortably switches between acrylic and oil paints and works on several canvases simultaneously. He prefers to paint on the floor instead of using an easel. He painstakingly applies oil paints in several thin layers. The layering of colours generates a painted surface that reflects light in a way that the painting appears to be luminous. Unver’s large and small-scale works are only different in terms of technique and medium, but the pictorial ethos, including the biomorphic forms, the sexual innuendos, and the use of colour, are common features.

Khan’s works are in Commonwealth Gallery, London, UK; Rockford Coating, Illinois, USA; Pakistan International Airlines, New York; Pakistan Administrative Staff College, Lahore; and other private collections internationally.