With views to the garden

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present "With Views to the Garden," a group exhibition that brings together recent works by Ayesha Jatoi, Waqas Khan, and Wardha Shabbir, whose practices relate to the Mughal tradition of miniature painting from South Asia, a demanding technique revisited here with contemporary materials, contexts, and approaches.

The title of the exhibition, inspired by the work of Wardha Shabbir that opens the show, evokes the theme of the garden. Throughout the history of civilizations, the garden has been understood as a meeting place, whether intimate or public, a space always ‘cultivated’: a product of the intersection between nature and human action, subject to perpetual change but also at risk of perishing. In art, philosophy, and literature, the garden has been a symbol of life, beauty, growth, and reflection. In this context, the works become multiple windows into the intimate space of each artist. By closely observing the universes contained in the various works on display, the meticulous marks and gestures that inhabit the surfaces of paper and canvas become intriguing. Khan's pointillism, Jatoi's geometry, or Shabbir's lush landscapes share the characteristic of a production that challenges immediacy, as well as the visitor's need to pause and contemplate with the appropriate time.

The works on display reveal themselves to the viewer as an antithesis to a fast-paced, noisy, and saturated world. The common thread of the exhibition could be contemplation and the possibility of inhabiting the spaces that these artists occupy during their creative process, where universally established measures, such as space and time, become obsolete. This thus opens up the possibility of altering the perception of these magnitudes and questioning the value inherently linked to them.