Artist Profile :: Rashid Rana

21 January 2009

In partnership with Gallery Nature Morte, one of India’s premiere contemporary art spaces since 1997, Phillips de Pury & Company presents The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, featuring 10 of the most influential and soughtafter artists working in India and Pakistan. The exhibition opens in London on 26 November 2008 and in New York on 28 January 2009.

Through 15 December 2008:
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

From 28 January - 14 February 2009:
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street New York NY

Rashid Rana is a master of addressing political and social issues through ironic juxtapositions. His works vacillate between the micro and the macro as he creates a composite image arranged from thousands of ‘pixels’ or miniaturized photos, often depicting mundane scenes of life in his city of Lahore.

In his work, Rana cleverly relates back to the history of art in Pakistan, his native country. A graduate of the National College of Arts, Lahore (with the most respected department for traditional miniature painting in the world), Rana deviated from his peers by moving into digital media and photography and away from the traditional painting techniques taught at the school. Yet, in spite of his embrace of new media, Rana manages to wryly preserve the idea of the miniature in his work through his mosaic-like use of minute photographs in constructing his mural-size images.

Rashid Rana, Dis-location 3, 2007-8

“In this age of uncertainty we have lost the privilege of having one world view. Now every image, idea and truth (may it be ancient or modern) encompasses its opposite within itself. Thus we live in a state of duality. This internal conflict translates into my work, on a formal level, as well as having geographical, historical and political connotations.” (Rashid Rana, Artist Statement, The 2006 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, not paginated)

Rana’s ability to identify and exploit these tensions between the whole and its parts in his pointillist photographs has become his hallmark. The artist is adept at pulling apart the world’s facades, forcing his viewers to look beyond the larger image and to the sum of its parts. In so doing, Rana reveals a litany of cultural, political and economic ills lying just beneath the surface of the carefully constructed representations we have come to accept as “reality.”

Rashid Rana lives in works in Lahore, Pakistan. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com