A display of the work of Nazakat Ali Depar is always an exciting event introducing the audience to a surreal world of colour, cultural traditions and personal experience. In Depar’s artworks nature and design are rendered in the tradition of miniature schools of art.

At an exhibition of the artist’s recent work exhibited at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi, the subject central to the narrative of the series is a young man familiar with the symbols of the princely art. He carries with him the famed storytelling parrot, passes his time with a lion and his dreams perched in a kikar tree.

As the artist has stated, “I’m making landscapes of thorns, kikar trees, cactus and a male figure depicting the cultural context of my surroundings…” Depar has applied his unique style in descriptive cameos in which the ingenious artistic combination of understanding textural effects, symbols and patterns open up to the viewer the ‘truncated’ dialogue that adapts and transforms an independent viewpoint.

The artist is an enormously talented and energetic young man whose work has been shown and appreciated in exhibitions mounted in Pakistan and abroad. Art enthusiasts will recall the series of paintings rendered on train tickets previously displayed at the Canvas Gallery; the outcome of the artist’s observant creative impulse while travelling from the National College of Arts, Lahore, as a student, to his home in Sindh.

Born in Larkana in 1985, Depar’s fervour for art led him to the National College of Arts, Lahore, where in 2009, he graduated with distinction in miniature painting. His former teacher, Ustad Bashir Ahmed, praises his linear strength and the way he ‘infuses his discipline with the classic methods used in miniature art’.

After his graduation the artist returned to Sindh and joined the faculty of the Centre of Excellence Art and Design, Jamshoro where he taught the art of miniature painting for two years. He is now engaged in teaching the miniature thesis classes at the Centre.

Painting with the traditional media of gouache on wasli, the artist includes in his oeuvre dogs fighting — the violence off-set by the beautiful linear outlines of the animals; one discovers male torsos and delicately depicted branches of thorns that convey countless symbolic meanings as they have throughout art history.

These paintings appear as continuation of the series, narrating the experience expressed by the artist as the subject continues his journey. One passage moves quite easily into another as along the way he meets his dark alter ego. The work is filled with cryptic message and meaning, and as Lewis Carroll described Alice’s journey through the looking glass; one discovers the existence of Red and White Queens on the way as well as the Mad Hatter.

Explaining his work, the artist exclaims, “My work is about exploring and recontextualising the conventional formation of miniature painting and in the process making unusual compositions…” Already making a reputation globally, his paintings have been mounted in prestigious exhibitions since his graduation and he has participated in international art Fairs in Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul and Dubai.

His work is striking and technically accomplished; Depar is one of the most interesting artists of his generation and we look forward to further expressions of this accomplished artist’s work.