Biography
Zahoor ul Akhlaq was born in Delhi, India, on 4 February 1941. After the partition of India in 1947, his family migrated to Pakistan and settled in Karachi. Akhlaq received his early education at Sindh Madrasa, Karachi, and learned calligraphy from Yousaf Dehlvi, a well-known calligrapher and a friend of his father’s.
In 1958, Akhlaq joined the National College of Arts, Lahore (NCA), where he studied under Shakir Ali (1916–1975), the pioneer of modern art in Pakistan. Besides Shakir Ali, another significant mentor of Akhlaq was Mark Ritter Sponenburgh (1916–2012), an American sculptor and the first principal (1958–1961) of NCA.
During his studies at NCA, Shakir Ali introduced Akhlaq to classics in English and Urdu literature to enrich his artistic practice. In 1963, a year after his graduation, Akhlaq joined the NCA Fine Arts department as a lecturer and started to teach painting. He received a British Council Scholarship for two postgraduate programs in printmaking at Hornsey College of Art (1966–1967) and the Royal College of Art, London (1968–1969). His stay in London furthered his knowledge of art practices in the Western art world, and he developed a keen interest in closely studying the Persian and Mughal miniature painting portfolios at the Victoria Albert Museum and the British Museum. After completing his postgraduate degrees, Akhlaq travelled extensively in Europe and worked in the prominent Atelier 17 of Stanley Hayter (1901–1988) in Paris with the Indian artist Krishna Reddy (1925–2018).
In his earlier work, Akhlaq used oil paint on canvas and board. After returning to Pakistan in 1969, he resumed his teaching duties at the NCA and extended his experimentation to different mediums and materials, including lithography, etching, ink drawing, and acrylic painting. Besides exploring mediums in his new work, studying traditional Indian manuscript painting became the leitmotif of Akhlaq’s exploration of the two-dimensional space of his canvases combined with abstraction. He selected specific formal characteristics of miniature painting, such as a frame within a frame, decorated borders, and multiple perspectives, and employed them in his work. Grids and geometric shapes appeared as a consistent theme, synonymous with Islamic architecture, calligraphy, and the abstraction of Piet Mondrian. Some recurring elements in his paintings include clouds, female figures, hands, mountains, and other folk and traditional decorative motifs.
Akhlaq’s use of lines is a distinctive characteristic of his etchings and drawings, almost giving the impression of calligraphy. These calligraphic forms have neither religious nor specific meanings; they are explorations of the aesthetic use and character of the line. Akhlaq’s use of colour in his paintings was selective and dominated by black and white. He stated that the essential components of a painting are colour, line, dimension, balance, and the synthesis of these elements. Together, they create a feeling or an effect for which there are no words to describe; attempting to do so is not the function of language.
In 1987, Akhlaq joined the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Religion, and the Arts at Yale University, USA, on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed his post-doctoral studies. During this time, he attended printmaking workshops and exhibited his work with his wife, ceramicist Sherezade Alam (1948–2022). In 1989, he returned to Pakistan to resume his teaching job at the NCA with his studio practice. He undertook several commissioned public and private projects between 1976 and his tragic death in 1999.
During one of his exhibitions in 1991 at Ziggurat Gallery in Karachi, Pakistan, Akhlaq posited, “The paintings on view were no more and no less than paintings. The paintings did not have to be understood; they were what they were as they appeared to the viewer.” Nevertheless, his work often reflected on social injustices and political upheavals in Pakistani society while merging Western modernist aesthetics with South Asian.
Akhlaq remains one of the most influential artists in Pakistan. His work became the springboard for the younger generation of artists in Pakistan, who carried his teachings through their artistic experimentation. Among his talented students from Pakistan, a few are now known internationally, including Rashid Rana, Shazia Sikander, Ali Raza, and Risham Syed. Pakistan), Bibliothèque Nationale De France (Paris, France), Wallraf-Richartz-Museum(Cologne, Germany), Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels, Belgium), British Council (London, UK), Hiroshima Museum of Art (Hiroshima, Japan), National Art Gallery (Islamabad, Pakistan), The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (Amman, Jordan), Mathaf (Doha, Qatar) and the embassies of Pakistan in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia.
