On show are some 100 artworks unfold via 11 sections of this lovely heritage constructing, which was as soon as the home of the maharaja of Bikaner and is now a vibrant cultural centre on the India Gate hexagon.
Muzaffar Ali, 78, is a person who has journeyed to many locations, and his artworks – work, collages, installations, furnishings – seize 5 many years of that inventive journey. So it’s only apt that every of those sections needs to be known as Makaam (vacation spot).
Via these works you see the filmmaker, the poet, the thinker, and the traveller who’s captivated by the surprise of nature – with leaves, stones and horses holding a particular place in his world. You additionally get a glimpse of the designer (in one other lifetime, Muzaffar Ali was even concerned in designing uniforms for the Air India crew and the interiors of its plane).
Photograph: Shahzid Chauhan
So the place does one begin the tour of “Muzaffar Ali: Mystic Journeys in Artwork”?
Maybe from the gallery of leaves, a symphony within the soothing shades of the earth that could possibly be learn as an ode to eternity. The dried leaves and the aged barks, that are central to those work, let you know it’s autumn, the magic of which the artist is celebrating. Autumn, in spite of everything, holds inside it the promise of spring.
A self-taught artist and a geology graduate from Aligarh Muslim College, Muzaffar Ali, whose topics included botany, is clearly a eager observer of nature. The cheetah watching from one of many work is simply one other proof of that.
Muzaffar Ali’s The Cheetahs in Foremost Artwork Gallery. (Photograph: Shahzid Chauhan)
The Home of Kotwara, the couture model he based in 1990 and which is known as after his dwelling some 160 km from Lucknow, can be referenced on this exhibition via installations within the hall resulting in the room of leaves.
Head to a unique wing of Bikaner Home and among the many first belongings you encounter is a small portray of his father, “Raja S Sajid Husain of Kotwara together with his 1924 Rover exterior La Martiniere Faculty, Lucknow”, and the {photograph} it recreates. On the wall working alongside the picket staircase close to the doorway is one other one, this time of the Raja together with his 1929 Isotta Fraschini in Scotland.
Maqaam at Bikaner Home. (Photograph: Shahzid Chauhan)
Now, is it even attainable to speak about Muzaffar Ali and never point out Gaman, his 1978 directorial debut that captured the despondent lives of migrants struggling to discover a foothold in an enormous metropolis? Or skip Umrao Jaan (1981) altogether?
So intense is the hangover of those movies that curator Uma Nair thought it finest to place the Portraits’ part proper to start with – “so that individuals can see them after which transfer on to the numerous different issues Muzaffar Ali is about,” she says, laughing.
So, there’s a portray of Umrao Jaan (Rekha), her face and hand glowing in an in any other case darkish composition. There’s additionally Khairun Nissa (Smita Patil from Gaman), her eyes wanting down, harking back to the movie’s final scene when she slowly closes the door after yet one more day of a hopeless await her migrant, Ghulam Hasan (Farooq Shaikh). And, there may be one – a vertical body – of his muse, his spouse Meera.
Awaaz e Ishq. (Photograph: Shahzid Chauhan)
Faces are tough to seize. Within the catalogue, Muzaffar Ali writes, “Generally accidentally I wander into this area and most frequently I get misplaced and trapped in it…. with the concern of shedding what I’ve seen within the face. I don’t wish to distort it or take quick cuts.”
The artist’s wanderlust additionally finds a singular expression within the windshields, dashboards and rearview mirrors of automobiles, which he has painted and became collages. All of them in earthy shades – tones he doesn’t get lost from. The automotive turns into the “lived panorama of life,” as Nair places it.
In one of many work, you may image him wanting forward via the windscreen at what’s to return and in addition wanting again, via the rearview, at what he has left behind – a second through which each the worlds converge. It’s a gaze of surprise he hopes he by no means loses.
The panorama sequence captures the refraction of sunshine, altering the view, altering it or including new dimensions to it, each for the traveller and the onlooker.
This magnum opus of an exhibition additionally brings to the world Muzaffar Ali’s furnishings and objects created in a number of mediums. The garments hanger, the chess desk, the espresso desk, the e-book covers, the present instances, the smoker’s chair… every a inventive collage.
Muzaffar Ali is a person of few phrases and lots of expressions.
His sequence impressed by the Sufi mystic Rumi, whom he quotes alongside a number of of his works, is a stroll right into a world of stillness and self-reflection.
It’s on this part that the exhibition’s largest canvas, “Awaaz e Ishq”, is displayed. A part of it was painted in his studio at Kotwara and a part of it at Bikaner Home final 12 months. The paranormal work with horses and falcons unfolded to Rumi’s poetry.
The horse, in its many kinds and moods, is the topic of a number of different of his works. Light, highly effective, loyal, secretive, spirited, the steed has invited some cautious examine. “I’ve had a horse for 12 years,” says Muzaffar Ali. “He’s known as Barack.”
Within the catalogue, the artist writes, “My love for horses started from childhood tales of the battlefield of ‘Karbala’ to the ornate Duldul to the horses I noticed on my travels to the numerous movies on horses.”
That is the inspiration for the ‘Karbala sequence’. It makes for one of the vital evocative sections, with sketches and work on the purple partitions of a room that’s full of the deep voice of Muzaffar Ali reciting a poem of his.
Soaking all of it in, a customer to the exhibition remarks, “One life will not be sufficient for somebody such as you.” As Muzaffar Ali smiles, Uma Nair, the curator, replies, “He has packed many lives into one.”
“Muzaffar Ali: Mystic Journeys in Artwork” is on at Bikaner Home, New Delhi, until January 21
