KARACHI ART SCENE

A preview of the solo exhibition of Contemporary jewellery and glass castings by artist Shakil Ismail was organised at Nomad Art Gallery (NAG) . Winner of many awards, Shakil is a graduate of Central Institute of Art and Craft, Karachi. He has been exhibiting since the mid 1980’s and has had innumerable solo and group exhibition at home and abroad. A Karachi based artist, he is a deft craftsman and has gained a reputation for his contemporary jewellery. He first exhibited his collection of metal jewellery in 1992 and found an appreciative market for his work. Since then he has taken time out to design unusual trinkets, sketching hundreds of designs and choosing just a few which translate into wearable pieces. He used charming colours to attract his fans . Qur’anic verses adorn his jewellery and form an integral part of his coloured glass sculpted pieces which are unique. His use of different media like copper, bronze and brass, and his experimentation with chemicals has resulted in a p...

UNICORN: An exhibition of paintings by Soraya Sikander opens at the Unicorn gallery at 5.30pm on Friday, 19 February. SHAKILISMAIL : An exhibition of calligraphy on sculptured pieces of metal, glass etc by Shakil Ismail opens at the ShakilIsmail art gallery at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 16 February. The show will remain open till February 22. GOETHE : AN exhibition of paintings by Ajmal Hussain opens at the Goethe-Institut on Tuesday. It will remain open till February 26, daily from 10am to 9pm. KUNJ : A solo exhibition of calligraphy by Hamid Nasir opened at the Kunj art gallery on Monday. The show will continue till March 15. CANVAS : ARTWORKS by Anila Quayyum Agha and Salman Toor will be put on display at the Canvas gallery at 5pm on Tuesday. The exhibition titled ‘All about us” will continue till February 25, daily from 11am to 8pm (except Sunday).

NUMBER 18 Rue Bouvreuil was once a mecca for lovers of Haitian art. Outside the Musée Galerie d’Art Nader, perched on a hillside overlooking Port-au-Prince, a sign greeted visitors. ‘On top of the town, top in the arts’ it boasted. Inside, the walls were plastered with thousands of paintings recording nearly a century of Haitian history. Now the three-storey art gallery is gone, reduced to a dusty heap of rubble and torn canvases. Broken picture frames from irreplaceable local masterpieces poke from the gallery’s ruins. “My dad has about 12,000 paintings here and we are trying to save what is left,” said Georges Nader, the son of Haiti’s best-known art collector and the owner of the gallery, as he scanned the debris. “We have only been able to save about 2,000 of them.” The human cost of Haiti’s worst earthquake in more than 200 years — at least 150,000 lives lost — has been well documented. But the disaster also struck a knockout blow to the heart of Haiti’s vibrant arts community. Se...