Hamra Abbas: Color | Garden

The exhibition is an extension of Hamra Abbas’ investigation in the poetics of multiplicity through the deconstruction of the colour black. Abbas’s phenomenology of color took an imaginative turn upon her encounter with a 17th century Mughal fountain in Lahore.

In the words of the artist, this pre-modern object “could easily pass for a Sol LeWitt or an Albers work only that it was made a few centuries earlier”. The discovery led to a series of work on Mughal gardens to excavate the symbolic significance of such images in relation to architecture, especially the interplay in the representation of nature and colour.

Abbas’s work breaks new ground as she pulls the traditional technique of marble inlay (granite, calcite, serpentine, jasper, and lapis lazuli) out of its historical functionality to create a new form of aesthetics.