Imran Mudassar’s exhibition of paintings at Rohtas Art Gallery has been going on for the fourth day nowEver since I was a student at the National College of Arts, I have always been interested in exploring the possibilities of printmaking techniques,” says Imran Mudassar, whose exhibition of artwork at Rohtas Art Gallery has been going on for the fourth day now, appreciated by many.
It is not common to express one’s thoughts and feelings through a medium such as printmaking, especially when most artists are using the most colourful techniques, such as acrylics and oils, and even water colours, which express the colours of the artist’s surroundings. Printmaking, therefore, to many may come as a more sedate medium, but how Imran Mudassar uses it, expressing the most complicated of his ideas, and using some of the most unconventional methods…the medium becomes the message.
Mudassar says that he had begun looking into many avant-garde methods of printmaking. These he says include rubber stamp printing, printing on cutlery and ceramics and panni printing (a traditional technique of printmaking commercially used for leather binding book covers).
“This habit of pushing my boundaries and exploring my medium has further taken my art practice into other directions as well, such as drawing, painting, video installations and performance and other mixed media techniques,” he says.
It was in his thesis project, that he tried to explore this medium further and produced a body of works by doing experimentation with different techniques.  This was especially common of printmaking on various types of traditional and non traditional surfaces and materials such as canvases, ceramics, leather binding, digital printing etc. The exhibition at Rohtas Gallery is Imran Mudassar’s thesis work itself.
Life for Mudassar it seems is the centrifugal force for him as an artist. Life and thoughts and expressions about it, the destructiveness of life along with the constructiveness of life, the two pulling ends of life and death, are all assimilated into of his body of works. War in particular has had a great impact with Mudassar.
His visit to Afghanistan in 2008, left an indelible mark on him, scarring him with certain elements of life that he had never before explored.
“I used human hearts and weapons side-by-side to show how life and death were interlinked in a war zone,” he explains. “In the paintings I explored the effect people’s surroundings had on their personalities.”
Like all other artists, or perhaps most of them anyway, most of Mudassar’s works are a comment on the world he is surrounded by and by dealing with the idea of Life and its Destructive force, he is in fact creating a dialogue between his own body and war related objects or events and how these have shaped his life.
“The combination of the human body and emotions (at certain places represented by images of human heart) and war related objects have created a kind of a tension for me and have depicted for me the idea of life and death,” he explains.
‘Departure’ for instance may seem to be the simplest of works, but a black human heart on gray holds so much more than it superficially appears to be. Part of the series, or an exhibition, and it is in context. But even independently, the blackened human heart (is it black thanks to the war grime, or gunpowder?) is the heart that has been left without any hope, and with the darkest thoughts.
‘Left Right’ (the infamous army command), is a comment on the way people’s behaviour is eventually shaped in a hostile environment. With orders of ‘left right’, how is it possible to retain free will?
While Mudassar’s 12 paintings are part of his thesis, one of them, ‘Life Drawing’, has even been displayed at the British Museum of Paintings.
Mudassar has used embossment and printmaking techniques on canvas for this series, embossing images in golden on a black background.
The exhibition will continue till April 27.