|
 Ijaz
ul Hassan studied at Atchison College and later read English for his
Master’s Degree at Government College Lahore and St. John’s College,
Cambridge. He studied painting at Fine Arts Department, Punjab University
and St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Ijaz is
recipient of the President’s award for Pride of Performance, the highest
national award in the field of art.
Ijaz ul
Hassan is one of Pakistan’s outstanding artists and a leader of a group of
painters who identify themselves with their surroundings. His work of the
seventies established a new trend in Pakistan Paintings. In the early
period, he employed popular images clipped from print media, posters and
cinema hoardings. Later, these were used to express larger social concerns.
Ijaz not merely painted, but lived the times for which he was on several
occasions apprehended and incarcerated. Many of the works of the period were
censored and removed from exhibitions. Canvas Gallery Karachi recently held
a retrospective show declassifying some of the works that have remained
concealed from public view.
In 1977
during Gen. Zia ul Haq's Martial Law, Ijaz ul Hassan was one of the first activists to
be arrested and put in solitary confinement at the infamous Lahore Fort.
During this period, when every form of dissent was crushed, Ijaz
tried to have his thoughts and feelings known to the viewers with images and
symbols; many derived from nature.
One of the
images established was that of a window through which you look from
lonely confinement to sunny prospects. This image he evolved peering through
the bars of his cell in which he was incarcerated at Naukhar. He also invented a series based
in a vine girdling a tree. The entwining vine conveyed the feeling of
togetherness and fulfilment. In a different vein, his painting flaunting
lilies express manifold ideas and feelings ranging from pain to joy.
Ijaz ul
hassan takes special pleasure in painting trees that have matured and
acquired striking individual identity. Most of these images symbolize human struggle and
growth. He also takes pain to record the phenomenon of life and death;
things coming into being and others perishing into oblivion; sombre
prospects being suddenly invaded by sun shine, silhouetted leaves ignited
and dark lilies set ablaze by stray rays if light; a Laburnum transforming
from spectre of death to spectacle of life and so on. Ijaz is thrilled to
draw strength from the regenerating force of nature – where an axe falls on
a limb, several shoots must grow next season.
Ijaz ul
Hassan writes regularly for national newspapers and international journals.
He is author of Painting in Pakistan published in 1990. He is an open candid
person but as a painter he is restrained in dilating on the
merit of his achievements. He has had seven solo exhibitions, but in the
course of almost five decades he has produced extensive body of work
including large murals.
|