Ehsan Memon
Born in 1989 in (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)
Ehsan Memon received a BFA (with Distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2016. His work has been shown at group exhibitions around Pakistan at a variety of galleries, including: Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Gallery 6, Islamabad; O Art Space, Lahore; Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, National College of Arts, Lahore; and Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore. He has participated in multiple art residencies, such as: Artist in Residency at International Steel Limited, Karachi; Pioneer Art Residency, Lahore; and Vasl Artists’ Collective’s Taza Tareen Residency, Karachi, as well as winning the Young Artist Award in Alhamra Art Gallery’s annual exhibition, ‘About Time’ in 2015. His sculpturally-based art practice toys with perception and notions of reality, manifesting itself in his work with the hyper-realistic re-creation of objects as souvenirs from personal narratives. An integral component of Memon’s work is its interaction with the viewer; its aesthetic verisimilitude deceives the viewer, subverting perceptions of reality, and in doing so, visually mimics the duplicitous facets of human behaviour.
In Memon’s untitled sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, the artist applies his practice of veristically replicating the form of objects to types of local flatbreads, creating a multitude of these convincing panary imitations with painted fiberglass. The realisation of the artist’s work brings to mind the reputed verisimilitude of Myron’s bronze Heifer, memorialised by dozens of epigrams in The Greek Anthology, one of which, written by Dioskorides, proclaims: “O, bull, in vain you mount this heifer, for it is lifeless. The sculptor of cows, Myron, has deceived you.” The illusion of veracity imbued within Memon’s sculptures provides a commentary on superficiality and deception in our society; simultaneously a representation of the ability of the human eye to be deceived by appearance, and the reality of deceit as an aspect of human behaviour.
