Imran Qureshi Homecoming

In the exhibition Homecoming, Imran Qureshi presents the most recent iteration of his miniature painting practice. The mesmerising landscapes are poised between refined technique and an ever-growing sense of artistic freedom. They are accompanied by works in which fragments of intricate landscapes in the style and palette of the artist’s miniature paintings are woven into map-like compositions, reworking past motifs in what Imran Qureshi describes as his artistic ‘look back at my own journey’ through the genre.

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Imran Qureshi learned the exacting craft of miniature painting in his native Pakisan. His pioneering practice constantly confronts the traditional artform, which emerged in the court of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, with contemporary contexts. The highly symbolic scenes he depicts bring out the frail beauty of the natural world in a comment on current environmental and political threats.

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Creating a dialogue between the tradition of miniature painting and the contemporary landscape has always been central to Imran Qureshi’s practice. The exaggerated crescent of the horizon line at the heart of several of the works traditionally symbolises the globe seen from afar, bringing together micro- and macroscopic perspectives of the world within the same image.

Imran Qureshi
Other Side Story, 2023
Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper
35.5 x 28.6 cm (13.98 x 11.26 in)

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In some works, meanwhile, the artist paints landscapes-within-landscapes, which he refers to as ‘patches’: a nod to the custom of later ‘interventions’ to an older Mughal miniature painting that ‘can show another side of the same landscape’. As the artist says, ‘I really love that idea of the interference of someone else into someone else's space, and this is the way that this world is working, I think.’ These far-reaching, compound modes of representation allow the artist to make universal observations within paradoxically small works.

Alongside the more familiar miniature paintings, the exhibition presents deconstructed works in which fragments of landscapes float across the surface of Imran Qureshi’s characteristic handmade wasli paper, which he leaves partly bare. An uprooted tree fallen on its side represents the changing landscapes of our ecologically fragile world.

Imran Qureshi
Easy Cutting, 2023
Gouache and Letraset transfer on wasli paper
27.2 x 35.6 cm (10.7 x 14 in)

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Dry-transferred dots recall targets as seen on missile guidance systems, which, in the context of 21st-century conflicts, have become an all too familiar lens through which to see the world. Stitch-like lines, meanwhile, resemble geographical partitions on a map, while also evoking surgical sutures, as if the fabric of the landscape had been cut and sewn back together in a in a suggestion of division and reconciliation.

Imran Qureshi
Easy Cutting, 2023
Gouache and Letraset transfer on wasli paper
35.6 x 27.2 cm (14 x 10.7 in)

Imran Qureshi
Easy Cutting, 2023
Gouache and Letraset transfer on wasli paper
34.3 x 26.7 cm (13.5 x 10.5 in)

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Exploring the scars left on the landscape by such conflicts, the artist retraces past motifs, including the missile that was emblematic of his miniature paintings from the turn of the 21st century. Disarmed through its incongruous beauty, the weapon is here wrapped in forests of vines and briar as if gradually being reclaimed by nature.

Imran Qureshi
Threatened, 2023
Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper
35.3 x 27.7 cm (13.9 x 10.91 in)

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There is a contrast between this object which is something to destroy life, but then it's full of life from inside. [...] You can have dual meaning with this idea. — Imran Qureshi

 

Imran Qureshi
Camouflaged Love, 2023
Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper
35.3 x 27.6 cm (13.9 x 10.87 in)

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Imran Qureshi

Pages of Perfection, 2023

Gouache, gold leaf, Letraset transfer and old book pages on wasli paper

31.8 x 22.9 cm (12.5 x 9 in)

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Imran Qureshi Pages of Perfection, 2023 Gouache, gold leaf, Letraset transfer and old book pages on wasli paper 31.8 x 22.9 cm (12.5 x 9 in)

Imran Qureshi

Pages of Perfection, 2023

Gouache, gold leaf, Letraset transfer and old book page on wasli paper

33 x 24.1 cm (13 x 9.5 in)

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Imran Qureshi Pages of Perfection, 2023 Gouache, gold leaf, Letraset transfer and old book page on wasli paper 33 x 24.1 cm (13 x 9.5 in)

In two works, by painting upon pages from a found mid-20th century book, Imran Qureshi bears witness to the historical context of illuminated manuscripts in which miniature paintings originally emerged. The artist conceals some parts of the printed Urdu text under paint and gold leaf and erases other parts with sandpaper until the page becomes so thin that the text from the other side shows through, softening it so it becomes almost a part of the landscape.

Across the exhibition, the figures often at the centre of Mughal miniature paintings are replaced by symbolic suggestions of a human presence. As Imran Qureshi stands missiles at the heart of some landscapes like characters, in other works, synecdochic shirts hang empty, hinting at the people they might contain. In the artist’s distinctive geometric visual language, richly coloured ovals, too, are a ‘symbolic representation of personalities’, which, he says, ‘could be me, could be someone else’.

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When I'm making an artwork, I start off with one idea, one mark, one thing. But then I build up the story around it by listening to my painting. — Imran Qureshi

‘When I was making these paintings’, says the artist, ‘the autumn season was just finishing, and spring was coming.’ This sense of endings and beginnings is reflected in the rich transitional colours that characterise the works in the exhibition. In this miniature painting, a mass of ochre leaves is raked, like at the end of autumn, to the centre of a field of newly blossoming flowers. Rooted in the tonal sensibility of traditional miniature painting, Imran Qureshi’s placement of these vibrant colours side by side animates the surfaces of the works.

Imran Qureshi
Scattered, Yet Together, 2023
Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper
35.5 x 27.5 cm (13.98 x 10.83 in)

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The artist qualifies himself as ‘intrigued by accident’. The preciousness of his new miniature paintings is tempered with spontaneity in a delicate balance between intricacy and artistic liberty. As dragonflies swarm, dashed lines cover the surfaces of several works like rainstorms. These lines, which miniature painters make around the edges of the paper to test their brush or pen, would typically be covered in the final work, but Imran Qureshi leaves them visible, making the act of painting an essential component of the finished piece.

Imran Qureshi
Where the Shadows Are So Deep, 2023
Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper
29.7 x 22.1 cm (11.7 x 8.7 in)

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The only work in the exhibition to depict a figure, this self-portrait shows the artist kneeling amid verdant foliage, while a fine, ribbon-like stem of his signature perylene maroon grows from the ground like a vein carrying nature’s vital essence. With two dragonflies hovering in his cupped hands representing ‘life, freedom, breathing’, but also the natural world in all its fragility, this work shows the artist, in his own words, ‘trying to make a connection’ with the world around him.

As meticulous brushwork and rich materiality meet with gestural mark-making and flowing freehand ornamentation, Homecoming unites tradition and freedom, order and disorder, to show the contradicting enchantment and foreboding of a world in which beauty and abundance coexist with conflict and environmental disasters. Yet, as the tumbling wildflowers and half-tamed fields take over, each of these disruptive landscapes is pacified by the hope that, in the end, nature will prevail.

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