Muzaffar Ali: A creative journey through many lives expressed in art

On show are some 100 artworks unfold through 11 sections of this lovely heritage constructing, which was as soon as the home of the maharaja of Bikaner and is now a vibrant cultural centre on the India Gate hexagon.

Muzaffar Ali, 78, is a person who has journeyed to many locations, and his artworks – work, collages, installations, furnishings – seize 5 a long time of that creative journey. So it’s only apt that every of those sections ought to be known as Makaam (vacation spot).

Through these works you see the filmmaker, the poet, the thinker, and the traveller who’s captivated by the marvel of nature – with leaves, stones and horses holding a particular place in his world. You additionally get a glimpse of the designer (in one other lifetime, Muzaffar Ali was even concerned in designing uniforms for the Air India crew and the interiors of its plane).

 

So the place does one begin the tour of “Muzaffar Ali: Mystic Journeys in Art”?

Perhaps from the gallery of leaves, a symphony in the soothing shades of the earth that might be learn as an ode to eternity. The dried leaves and the aged barks, that are central to those work, let you know it’s autumn, the magic of which the artist is celebrating. Autumn, in spite of everything, holds inside it the promise of spring.

A self-taught artist and a geology graduate from Aligarh Muslim University, Muzaffar Ali, whose topics included botany, is clearly a eager observer of nature. The cheetah watching from one of many work is simply one other proof of that.

 

Muzaffar Ali’s The Cheetahs in Main Art Gallery. (Photo: Shahzid Chauhan)

The House of Kotwara, the couture model he based in 1990 and which is called after his house some 160 km from Lucknow, can also be referenced in this exhibition through installations in the hall resulting in the room of leaves.

Head to a distinct wing of Bikaner House and among the many first stuff you encounter is a small portray of his father, “Raja S Sajid Husain of Kotwara with his 1924 Rover outside La Martiniere College, Lucknow”, and the {photograph} it recreates. On the wall working alongside the picket staircase close to the doorway is one other one, this time of the Raja along with his 1929 Isotta Fraschini in Scotland.

 

Maqaam at Bikaner House. (Photo: Shahzid Chauhan)

Now, is it even attainable to speak about Muzaffar Ali and never point out Gaman, his 1978 directorial debut that captured the despondent lives of migrants struggling to discover a foothold in a giant metropolis? Or skip Umrao Jaan (1981) altogether?

So intense is the hangover of those movies that curator Uma Nair thought it finest to place the Portraits’ part proper in the start – “so that people can see them and then move on to the many other things Muzaffar Ali is about,” she says, laughing.

So, there’s a portray of Umrao Jaan (Rekha), her face and hand glowing in an in any other case darkish composition. There’s additionally Khairun Nissa (Smita Patil from Gaman), her eyes wanting down, paying homage to the movie’s final scene when she slowly closes the door after one more day of a hopeless await her migrant, Ghulam Hasan (Farooq Shaikh). And, there may be one – a vertical body – of his muse, his spouse Meera.

 

Awaaz e Ishq. (Photo: Shahzid Chauhan)

Faces are difficult to seize. In {the catalogue}, Muzaffar Ali writes, “Sometimes by accident I wander into this domain and most often I get lost and trapped in it…. with the fear of losing what I have seen in the face. I don’t want to distort it or take short cuts.”

The artist’s wanderlust additionally finds a novel expression in the windshields, dashboards and rearview mirrors of vehicles, which he has painted and was collages. All of them in earthy shades – tones he doesn’t get lost from. The automotive turns into the “lived landscape of life,” as Nair places it.

In one of many work, you may image him wanting forward through the windscreen at what’s to return and in addition wanting again, through the rearview, at what he has left behind – a second in which each the worlds converge. It’s a gaze of marvel he hopes he by no means loses.

The panorama sequence captures the refraction of sunshine, altering the view, altering it or including new dimensions to it, each for the traveller and the onlooker.

This magnum opus of an exhibition additionally brings to the world Muzaffar Ali’s furnishings and objects created in a number of mediums. The garments hanger, the chess desk, the espresso desk, the e book covers, the reward instances, the smoker’s chair… every a creative collage.

Muzaffar Ali is a person of few phrases and many expressions.

His sequence impressed by the Sufi mystic Rumi, whom he quotes alongside a number of of his works, is a stroll right into a world of stillness and self-reflection.   

It is in this part that the exhibition’s largest canvas, “Awaaz e Ishq”, is displayed. Part of it was painted in his studio at Kotwara and a part of it at Bikaner House final yr. The mystical work with horses and falcons unfolded to Rumi’s poetry.

The horse, in its many varieties and moods, is the topic of a number of different of his works. Gentle, highly effective, loyal, secretive, spirited, the steed has invited some cautious examine. “I have had a horse for 12 years,” says Muzaffar Ali. “He is called Barack.”

In {the catalogue}, the artist writes, “My love for horses began from childhood stories of the battlefield of ‘Karbala’ to the ornate Duldul to the horses I saw on my travels to the many films on horses.”

This is the inspiration for the ‘Karbala series’. It makes for probably the most evocative sections, with sketches and work on the purple partitions of a room that’s full of the deep voice of Muzaffar Ali reciting a poem of his.

Soaking all of it in, a customer to the exhibition remarks, “One life is not enough for someone like you.” As Muzaffar Ali smiles, Uma Nair, the curator, replies, “He has packed many lives into one.”

“Muzaffar Ali: Mystic Journeys in Art” is on at Bikaner House, New Delhi, until January 21