Artist Profile :: Hamra Abbas

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

Hamra Abbas takes widely accepted cultural and spiritual traditions as her subject matter, using various media and contexts to imbue then with playfulness and satire. Abbas studied traditional miniature painting at the Nation College of Arts, Lahore and her meticulous techniques were nurtured during the years spent there. In all of her work, Abbas is able to meld serious political discussions with light-hearted subjects and meticulous craftsmanship. In It’s a Boy, the artist combines a Post-Modern style of appropriation with both allegory and history, revealing commonalties in fairly disparate times and belief systems. She selects the logo from Woodward’s Gripe Water packaging, an British remedy common in South Asia for treatment of babies with colic. The logo finds its roots in the myth of the infant Krishna strangling two vicious snakes. Abbas takes this one step further to suggest the invincibility of the male child in Asia which the variety of colors the babies come in suggests a computer-game version of the human race.

Hamra Abbas, It was a Little Demon I Tell You, 2008

In MoMA is the Star!, Abbas focuses on the exhibition of masterpieces from the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art at Berlin’s New National Gallery. The single-channel video documents the last day that this watershed exhibition was open to the public, which saw more than 1.2 million visitors in its seven month run and was viewed as the “Art Event of 2004”. Filming the massive queues outside the New National Gallery, Abbas comments on the power of this American institution as well as its massive branding and commercial self-representation, regardless of the art works on display inside. The boredom of those in line outside the museum is shadowed by the power of both the artworks and the institution on display inside, conjuring questions of the actual existence of any international, cultural hegemony .

In As Good as the Real Thing – 141 Names of Imagination, Abbas uses hundred of intricately designed paper airplanes to create a giant design which sweeps from the floor up the wall to the ceiling. Each plane is unique and created by an incredibly intricate lace-like paper, cut in a way that suggests Islamic textile and ceramic design. Utilizing Eastern decorative motifs to create the airplanes, Abbas summons many post-9/11 associations of travel, terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Adding layers to the work, Abbas imbues innocence to the piece by the use of the simple childhood paper airplane. Each plane bears a single word repeated over and over, chosen because of its relationship to the theme of imagination in its vast and numerous incarnations.

Hamra Abbas lives and works in Islamabad, Pakistan. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com