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Wasan Khurshid
Sculptor
Pakistan
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Khurshid Anwar Khattak
One year training as painter & decorator in Technical Training Center, Gulburg, Lahore, Pakistan (1972-1973)
Exhibitions:
Youth Exhibition in 1987, Alhamra art gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Calligraphy Exhibition in 1989, National Counsel of the Arts, National
Art gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan
Individual exhibition in Dec. 2004, French Cultural Center (alliance Francaise), Islamabad, Pakstan
Styles:
Realism, Impressionism, Abstract, Abstract expansionism, and surrealism.
Divine influence from Surrealistic school of thought, my favorite great legends is Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and Ustad Allah Bux, Abdul Rehman Cugthai, Sadeqain, and many more.
My Feeling & My Philosophy: Wasan Khurshid
I see and I have practiced hard to see. through and through and deep inside, because the every existence does have shape, a definitive imagery a consolidated perception at least one of the unseen horizons. one of unsung melodies and those who can see, must feel it and those who can feel, must bear the anguish of sense and those who can bear the pain of creations up on them must preserve this pain into existence of beauty. and these statues are the creations of this pain. that I am still passing through, I have often enter into the realms of unconsciousness, the real self, the true experience and thus I see the faces, montages, ideas, and colors in my mediums. Stone and rocks are wrapping the figure and forms. Which, I only unfold. log and woods commonly steal the ideas and imagery, which I just enhance. When the colors are speaking to you. and words magnifying their presence in persona. When rocks liquefy to the cast able ideologies and woods carve them selves. In front of you. Then must you have entered the flowing world of liberated self “Surrealisms”.
The life concepts temperament
visible to me slightly, at that,
I cannot cling my self with
materialistic race, all things fleeting at
for-off to Black, at that rise to me
great spectrum of live realities,
must have to frozen souvenir
as human beings, as an artist
Surrealism: An Illumination in Darkness (Wasan's way to look)
By Ahmed Mujtaba
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams." Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Italian surrealist painter.
We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit consideration of any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and more difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common sense is its keeper. As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing a constant process of becoming and, what is more, solidly relying on concrete facts, surrealism has brought together and is still bringing together diverse temperaments individually obeying or resisting a variety of bents. A twentieth century avant-garde art movement that originated in the nihilistic ideas of the Dadaist and French literary figures, especially those of its founder, French writer André Breton (1896-1966). At first a Dadaist, he wrote three manifestos about Surrealism -- in 1924, 1930, and 1934, and opened a studio for "surrealist research.” Influenced by the theories of the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (German, 1856-1939), the images found in surrealist works are as confusing and startling as those of dreams. Surrealist works can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies, as in the works of René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1988), Yves Tanguy (French, 1900-1955), and Alfred Pellan (Canadian, 1906-1988). These artists were partly inspired by Symbolism, and partly the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978) or, it could have a more abstract style, as in the works of Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983), Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976), and André Masson (French, 1896-1987), who invented spontaneous techniques, modeled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of "free association" as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the workings of the unconscious mind, such as exquisite corpse.[1-5]
Faithful to his interpretation, a very genuine name of surrealistic approach in our part of land Wasan Khurshid sees the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free _expression of feeling, and felt form, which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance. He believed abstractionism is the only way to bring to life the images of the subconscious. Coming from the Dada tradition, Wasan Khurshid also linked scandal, insult and irreverence toward the elite's with freedom. He continues to believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them, refer to his imagination in in his work of OUGHT describing an innate and intense feeling of torture, pain and frigidity towards a human being which is sort of reflection of Salvador Dalí, Autumnal Cannibalism, 1936, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London, although in contrast of oil and wood media. When psychology talked about Automatism, he interprets it as referring to a suppression of consciousness in favor of the subconscious, being more focused on feeling and less analytical, understood Automatism to be the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. He believed these images should not be burdened with "meaning." This is also a reflection of his persona blessed in his wooden piece SONG OF LOVE emitting a ray of internal delight of purest naturally of making an instinctual contact of otherwise two separate habits. For an analytical comparison of same surrealistic ideology portrayed see Marc Chagall, Birthday (L'Anniversaire), 1915, oil on cardboard, Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Under colour of civilization, under pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life - to Wasan's belief by far the most important - with which it was supposed that he no longer had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to spiritual mentor of the surrealistic movement, Freud. Based on these discoveries he is forming an opinion that will enable the explorer of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as he will be in taking into account more than mere summary realities. The very deep-rooted aura of an imagination is perhaps on the point of his ill-defined well-percept imagery of wooden touches. For a ready reference observe VENUS, his very personal way of perceiving the load of beauty which somewhere in deepest of his recollection is mixing with universal conception of "beast" which is a sheer contrast challenging boldly Praxiteles, Crouching Aphrodite or so-called "Venus of Doidalsas" (Paris, Louvre) mid 3rd century BC, and it is being so rebelestic is essentially an work in surrealistic mood.
"Surrealism. Noun, masculine. Pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation."[6] Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive _expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. Surrealism was a mean of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a scurrility.
At the end of the First War World, Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada movement, wanted to attack society through scandal. He believed that a society that creates the monstrosity of war does not deserve art, so he decided to give it anti-art-not beauty but ugliness. The Surrealist movement gained momentum after the Dada movement. It was lead by Andre Breton, a French doctor who had fought in the trenches during the First World War. The artists in the movement researched and studied the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Some of the artists in the group expressed themselves in the abstract tradition, while others, expressed themselves in the symbolic tradition.
As a mere part but not a complete resolute of Poetic Surrealist, Wasan sees the academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity; as a way to freeze images that, if unrecorded, would easily dissolve once again into the unknown. He hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The "Three Goddesses" from the east pediment (London, British Museum) is reflected in a very different, contrasting and challenging effort in Wasan's imagery called MOODS depicting three different psyches in a single entity, aggressive, complying and paranoiac, all miles away apart but indelibly coherent. This wooden piece is worth his whole ideation of human psyche. The language of the subconscious is the image, and the consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words. The Poetic Surrealistic touch quest in Wasan's dilemma is none other than the one described by Breton as, "The cause of freedom and the transformation of man's consciousness." Dali embraced all the science of painting as a way to study the psyche through subconscious images. He called this process the Paranoiac Critical Method. As any paranoiac, the artist should allow these images to reach the conscience, and then do what the paranoiac cannot do: Freeze them on canvas to give consciousness the opportunity to comprehend their meaning. Later on, he expanded the process into the Oniric-Critical Method, in which the artist pays attention to his dreams, freezing them through art, and analyzing them as well. As Freud said, "A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened. "Picasso took the opposite approach to art. He inherited the gusto for ugliness, scandal and chaos of the Dada movement and the automatic surrealists. Picasso rejected the craft to become "primitive," deciding that the ingenuity of childhood is the basis of art. To him this meant that the less the artist is preoccupied with his craft the better his art. To Dali, however, the "ingenuity of childhood" meant keeping an open mind and maintaining the curiosity and excitement of the child throughout one's life, not painting as a child. In EXTORTION the particularization of a locked woman is Wasan's genuine vision commemorating Marc Chagall, Young Girl in Pursuit, c. 1927-28, oil on composition board, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA. This sculpture EXTORTION revives the surrealistic manifesto of visualizing, experiencing, enduring and differencing the life out of farce nothingness of delusional realism. The variation in style, concept and delivery presents a versatility in Wasan,s work. Description of flow geometry in REFUGEES and GRANDFATHER styles boldness and expressivity previously portrayed in surrealistic movement in past e.g René Magritte, The Spirit of Geometry, 1937, Tate Gallery, London.
Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy used dreamlike perception of space and dream-inspired symbols such as melting watches and huge metronomes. Max Ernst and René Magritte constructed fantastic imagery from startling combinations of incongruous elements of reality painted with photographic attention to detail. These artists have been labeled as poets because their paintings involve transformations of the real world.[1-5]
" Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind's concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest
road that leads to everywhere."[7]
Because it was ignored and rejected by the new academy of modernism, Poetic Surrealism in its evolution has become a new art. A new art that in the words of Donald Kuspit, "Must first show that it has democratic appeal-appeal to those generally unschooled in art or not professionally interested in it. Then it must suffer a period of aristocratic rejection by those schooled in an accepted and thereby 'traditional' form of art-those with a vested interest in a known art and concerned with protecting it at all costs." WOMAN ON BEACH is a rather different experiment collagen cubism and a flowing caress of surrealistic roots. this experiment is not new in surrealists as Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902-1982), dared this collage in The Jungle, 1943, gouache on paper, Museum of Modern Art, NY. Lam's fantastical moonlit scene portrays masked figures amid stalks of bamboo and sugarcane. Although he was an integral member of the surrealist movement, Lam's multi-perspective renderings of these figures mirrors his use of Cubist vocabulary. Rene Magritte. The Future of Statues, 1937, painted plaster relief, Tate Gallery, London is a surrealistic inspiration behind Wasan's SMILE OF THE THIRD MAN wooden piece which being an absolute simile to super conscious or Id horrifies a surface perception of external character of a human being.
Contemporary Poetic Surrealists have worked for the past fifty years in silent seclusion. A renaissance of this art form will provide the world with new eternal aesthetic pleasures and reawaken the use of meaningful _expression in art, so that it can once again have a dialogue with the public. The depression created by external oppression and perceived effect imaged in Salvador Dalí, Remorse or Sphinx Embedded in the Sand, 1931, reflects with same anger and back-ground depression in Wasan's BIRD, severed wings and innate instinct of flying casts immaculate colors of depression, anger and struggle which is similar above mentioned ideology in both though medium of _expression is different altogether. LILLY FAMILY has a similar under-surfaced melancholy portrayed. Joan Miró had a very peculiar ideology of hope and divine calm e.g Women and Bird in the Moonlight, 1949, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London. Wasan play the same persona of same ideology in rather discrete statue of WOMAN BEHIND MAN signifying the conceptual divinity in spiritual pull of a woman given to a man out of his most feared hade and his paranoiac abysses depicting his metamorphosis. SONG OF LOVE [stone], and JOY [stone] by Wasan are representatives of a dreamy stagnant serpent of volcanic libido experienced in Salvador Dalí as Retrospective Bust of a Woman (Buste de femme rétrospectif), 1933, some elements reconstructed 1970, painted porcelain, bread, corn, feathers, paint on paper, Museum of Modern Art, NY. which radiates everlasting desire of an artist to follow instinct.
"It remains a dire need, if truth be still an honorable cause, to set forth an option upon the records of time by which considerate humanity might judge for itself the merits and the players in one of our century's most vilified and degraded forms of _expression."[8]
New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them. ''They are, in fact, always running through the intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are concerned, remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old and mortal shivers are trying to substitute themselves for those which are the very shivers of knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful disease, a disease followed by the deprivation of all rights; it is only a matter Soft having the courage to face them also.[7]
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic. . . .
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism. . . .
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere. . . .
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense. . . .
Picasso is surrealist in cubism. . . .
Pink Floyd is surrealist in distant echoes....... so let the artist imagine.
Bibliography:
See A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (tr. 1969); L. Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art (1970); R. Brandon, Surreal Lives (1999); studies by P. Waldberg (1966), W. S. Rubin (1969), S. Alexandrian (1970), H. S. Gershman (1969, repr. 1974), J. H. Matthews (1977), E. B. Henning (1979), A. Balakian (1987), H. Lewis (1988), and M. Nadeau (tr. 1967, repr. 1989).
References:
1.Giorgio de Chirico 1888-1978 Greek/Italian Painter/Sculptor
2.Man Ray, Pisces, 1938, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 73.0 cm, Tate Gallery, London
3.Max Ernst, Capricorn, 1948 / 1964, bronze, 245 x 207 x 157 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.
4.Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13 inches, Museum of Modern Art, NY.
5.Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone, 1936, plastic, painted plaster and mixed media, 17.8 x 33.0 x 17.8 cm, Tate Gallery, London. This sculpture is a classic example of the Surrealist practice of juxtaposing otherwise unrelated everyday items. The Surrealists valued the mysterious and provocative effect of such incongruities. Dalí believed that his objects expressed the secret desires of the unconscious, and that lobsters and telephones reveal the prominence of the sexuality.
6.André Breton (1896-1966), French surrealist writer defining Surrealism in his Surrealist Manifesto, 1924
7.W h a t i s S u r r e a l i s m - by André Breton
8.Michael S. Bell, a specialist in American Art
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