The Minister, Culture, Health, and Information, Sherry Rehman will inaugurate the exhibition of 120 works of late painter couple Anna Molka Ahmed and Sheikh Ahmed at the National Art Gallery today (evening). The daughter of the late couple, Tahira Ayaz, worked hard for long two months to hold the event in honour of her Dynamic parents.
She said her mother, Anna Molka Ahmad was a virtual dynamo. She started the modernist art movement in Pakistan that gave birth to a new generation of contemporary painters. Similarly, her father, once an engineer, gave up the profession after the damage of one of his lungs. On returning home to then India, he stopped over London and by chance met Anna Molka, a Jew.
He studies at Slade School of Arts in London and became a great draftsman. 'Painting was his great passion,' Molka told her daughters Zara David and Tahira Ayaz. Well known art critic, Syed Amjad Ali once wrote that Ahmed made a reputation as an art illustrator with Oxford University Press where he once worked; he also became famous for etching, lithography and designing.
The late painter also found a patron in Z A Nizami at the Karachi Development Authority and published a large number of his papers. However, while Ahmad was a quiet and docile, Molka (1917 - 1994), became a pioneer of fine arts in the new country, Pakistan, where she was a professor of fine arts at the Punjab University. Molka, born to a polish mother and Russian father, was tempestuous and would rant and rave but was a mild and gentleperson.
The exhibition would display a series of portraits, at different age and in a variety of moods. Although, all her paintings are outstanding she came to more prominence with her best known works of dabbed paint executed with knife, says her daughter.
Some of her best known works are The Fasting Buddha, and a portrait of the Punjab Secretariat. One of her paint and knife work, Heer and Ranjha displayed at the National Assembly is a most attractive and soothing work. A real souvenir of the exhibition would be the brochure published by the National Art Gallery. Ayaz has also published a souvenir in form of a brochure with 37 coloured illustration.