Shakir Ali is incomparable in his position of modern artist, academician and inspirational mentor, especially in the formative years of art in Pakistan. His art journey started in Mumbai, India, and his concepts and techniques evolved in Europe, before he joined the Mayo School of Arts in 1952, and turned this industrial arts institution into the National College of Arts (NCA) in 1958.

The Shakir Ali Museum, and the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA), are celebrating 2016 as the centenary year of Shakir Ali’s birth. Symposiums, seminars and exhibitions have been organised throughout the year, to pay homage to him.

The exhibition of paintings by Masood Kohari at Royat Gallery, Lahore, is part of this series where the artist presented reverence of his mentor and friend by assimilating his own style with that of Shakir Sahib, to create an array of colourful canvases, expressing a contemplative approach and understanding of the artist.

The birth centenary of Shakir Ali begins with the exhibition of paintings by Masood Kohari

This exhibition was attended by a large number of art lovers and admirers of Shakir Ali, where an original painting by the maestro also hung, which the distinguished architect Nayar Ali Dada presented as a token of remembence of the great Pakistani legend.

Kohari was born in 1937 and met Shakir Ali in the ’60s. He attributes Shakir Sahib as a friendly guru who taught him to find his own way, as well as the artist within, at a very young age. Now the artist is based in Paris, and visits Pakistan intermittently. He has been involved in creating artworks in multifarious mediums; mainly oil on canvas, clay, and glass. This diversity demonstrates the artist’s nature who practised and trained himself in clay or ceramics; (a tradition and art in Punjab), and simultaneously, he learned delicate glasswork techniques in Italy.

Kohari presented 21 paintings in this show, based on Shakir Ali’s own work; the figure, the bird, and the vase, have been added by Kohari with his own style of rendering realistic figures. These paintings, in one way or the other, create a nostalgic sentimentality and ambiance for the viewer.

Since the artist has lived in France, his work conveys a modern visual patterns of figurative and conceptual value; the main features of Western-style painting. This might be one reason that Kohari’s work has never been celebrated in Pakistan openly, and restricted to a limited viewership. However, the current show, where the artist has presented his figures in congunction with Shakir Ali’s famous outlined figures, displays a relationship with local art, and familiar visual doctrine.

Kohari offered his tribute in his own style, as an artist who has seen Shakir Ali working, and lived in Shakir Sahib’s time. Besides Kohari, there are many others who have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by patterns of modernity introduced by the great Shakir Ali to academic art in Pakistan.

Shakir Sahib contributed by contextualising and establishing the ideology of modern art, through the indigenous visual idiom of art in Pakistan. This show should be the first drop of rain, as there are many masters of Pakistani art whom we can celebrate, without waiting for their centennial year to come.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 17th, 2016