Zulfikar Aazeen paints 41 leading personalities

Pakistan News & Features Services

The city of Karachi is dotted with art galleries and more often than not, there are at least three or four exhibitions running concurrently. A few of these come as a whiff of fresh air as they appear different from the present-day trends of just abstractism and modernism, requiring of the viewer to run away with his imagination to figure out what the artist is actually trying to convey, calling for a penchant for mental acrobatics.

The Fine Art Pakistan Gallery, housed in Defence Housing Authority (DHA) Phase-V, is the venue of a classy exhibition these days where artist Zulfikar Aazeen and the 41 paintings on display are those of all important personalities, having made awesome contributions in their respective pursuits and done the country proud. 

The list extends over a wide spectrum of pursuits, politics to show business, social service to the academia to poetry, and a host of others. Inaugurated on August 31, the exhibition will continue at the gallery until September 7. 

There are two paintings of a suave Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Then on to a totally diverse field, music and show business, is a coloured portrait of the late Malika-e-Tarannum Madam Noor Jahan.

Another showbiz personality featured in the series of paintings is film and television celebrity Zia Mohyeddin, a person who brought Pakistan into the limelight on the global cinematic scene by having appeared in epics like Lawrence of Arabia and having acted on the West End stage in London and Broadway in New York. 

Then another totally diverse dispensation, the realm of science and discovery, and there’s a portrait of Pakistan’s Nobel laureate Dr Abdus Salam, the only Pakistani to have received the highest global award for his contribution to physics, having shared the prize with US scientist Steven Weinberg for the Salam-Weinberg theory of gravitational force. 

Then, of course, there’s a painting of a person who is not only a source of pride for Pakistan but for the world at large, Lenin Peace Prize winning poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a man who, through his verse, brought out the injustices, the inequalities, and the exploitation of capitalism, the exploitation of the poor by the rich.