An overview of the Pakistani artist's practice over the past 15 years.
Suggesting subtle ways in which the reductive language of geometric abstraction can be opened up to spatial and temporal complexities, Fahd Burki's almost decade-long foray into minimalist abstraction, results in a body of work marked with reversals, contradictions, and paradoxes—yet, very little is ever left up to accident or chance.
This book was published in conjunction with Burki's first survey exhibition, daydreams, held at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, which brought together works spanning fifteen years of the artist's practice. His influences, methods, and approaches to art making are chronicled through a generous visual apparatus and compelling essays by Saira Ansari and Murtaza Vali.
"For too long, we have tried to find the right vocabulary for the rest of the world (as well as for purists back home) to understand how our practices—Burki's art and my writing—are Pakistani even when they don't look or sound it. In some ways, we may not fit the bill at all, and we are entirely comfortable with that; but in many other ways, we are the quintessential generation of city kids who grew up in the middle of an independent media revolution and, later, the arrival of the Internet."
—Saira Ansari
Fahd Burki was born in 1981 in Lahore, Pakistan. His paintings, drawings and sculptures are inspired by a wide range of influences including architecture, nature and various strands of contemporary popular culture. Burki's early figurative works are playfully executed using flat graphic colours, symbols and shapes. Over the years, his practice has evolved through slight variations and reductions resulting in more minimalist abstract compositions consisting of grids, lines and blank spaces; created using subtle materials to make barely visible marks and light washes. Burki also explores the space between painting and sculpture through reliefs. He reduces the work to its most essential elements, focusing on materiality, with an emphasis on weight and form.
Fahd Burki graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2003 and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2010. His work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows internationally, including: 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden, 2017; National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2016; Gwangju Biennale 11, 2016; Office for Contemporary Art Norway: OCA, Oslo, 2016; Dhaka Art Summit, 2016; British Council Headquarters, London 2015 and Carré D'Art, Nîmes, 2014.
