ART FACTS: Beauty in the mundane

07 Jul, 2012

Through her spontaneous and aesthetic work Hamra Abbas enhances the colours contrast and details of the sculptures. Her versatile practice gives her chance to deal with wide range of media. She uses cultural motifs and iconology to compose her imagery transforming traditional patterns into her compositional structures.
An internationally acclaimed artist Hamra Abbas is a recipient of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize and the Jury Prize at the ninth Sharjah Biennial; recently she exhibited her artworks in diverse media at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi. An alumnus of the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore and Universität der Künste in Berlin, Hamra touched the unexceptional and common subjects in her artworks.
Her work is conventional in a way, which conforms to the socially accepted customs of behaviour and mood of living. She especially discusses the imagination of people regarding certain norms of life. This can be seen in a set of three wood and fiber glass life-size sculptures depicting flying horses with female faces titled 'Ride' in pink, blue and yellow colours. These winged horses with a head of a woman remind the figures painted at the back of trucks running along the roadside which serve as the canvas for the common street painters.
Another series titled 'Idols' consists of enlarged prints of seven portraits depicting various characters from daily life of many young and old people which we encounter every day. The unusual work is the execution of these sculptures in coloured plasticine. She assembled each sculpture's head with the small pieces of coloured plasticine shaping the many colours and moods of the faces giving her work a unique feeling and look.
Her sculptures involve elements of interaction with the place of their origin. Her consistency of work shows her potential in transforming and mingling into the surrounding environment.
She visits many cities of various countries where she encounter different people of different culture and religion and environment. She observes their behaviours and style of living and responding to certain issues regarding their societies and thus feels to transfer all that experience in the form of sculptures. The faces of her sculptures are the faces she see and have conversation with which develop certain relationship for a time being though but that brief encounter results in her unique work of art. Her peculiar contemporary work catches the eye of the art lovers. She has participated in international exhibitions in many countries around the globe like U S, UK, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Taiwan, Singapore and Spain.
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