Alistair Hudson, director Manchester Art Gallery is speaking. Waqas Khan will be present at the opening.
In his second major exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger, Pakistani artist Waqas Khan examines the omnipresence of the non-image. Waqas Khan, who studied printmaking at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, places with the greatest precision, thousands of small dots, bows and lines on paper. He joins them to netlike or geometric structures, often broken with deliberate imperfections or densifications and thus, combined with a special breathing technique, applied while working, they are becoming an organic whole.
In his last exhibition Acoustics of Life, 2015, Kahn combined delicate dots and bows in black, white and red, in impressive large formats on fine Wasli paper, to form gossamer structures.
HISTORY, MEMORY OR GEOMETRy - shows works that have received more and more attention due to the allusive handling of the invisible in the culture and the geopolitical neutrality. His pen on paper works are a kind of tableau vivant of the lack of interpersonal communication and the absence of a premise. The amalgamation of dots and dashes in his pictures seem mute, but yet extensive in their possibilities of meaning.
Waqas Khan was born in 1982 in Akhtarabad, Pakistan and lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan. In 2018 he was awarded the NDTV Spectrum award in transformation in visual arts in Southeast Asia and the ACTA awarded in arts, in 2013 he was nominated for the Jameel Prize; selection of solo and group exhibitions: Lahore Biennale 01, Lahore, Pakistan (2018), GA, Waqas Khan, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester GB (2017) EA, 57th Venice Biennale - Viva Arte Viva, Venice, Italy (2017), GA, Doublethink: Double vision, curated by Alistair Hicks, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2017) GA, The Absence of Path, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2017), GA, Decor, curated by Tino Sehgal, Villa Empain Fondation Boghossian, Brussels, Belgium (2016), GA, Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures, curated by Prajit Dutta and Murtaza Vali, Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2016) GA, Dhaka Art Summit 2016 , Dhaka, Bangladesh, GA, Fear nothing, she says. When art reveals mystic truths, curated by Rosa Martinez, Museu Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, Spain (2015) GA, Jameel Prize 3, NTU Singapore, Singapore, Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, Sharjah (2015), GA, and Hermitage Kazan Museum, Menge Museum Moscow, Moscow (2014), GA, Drawingroom, curated by Peter Weiermair, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria, (2014) and in the Ursula Blickle Foundation, Vienna (2013), GA, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2013), GA; Exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger: Acoustics of Life, Galerie Krinzinger (2015) EA, In Other Words ..., Krinzinger Projects (2013) EA.
