Moeen Faruqi

Born in 1958 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Moeen Faruqi is an artist and poet whose work aims to capture the everyday alienation of modernity. His paintings have been exhibited widely within Pakistan and internationally in Canada, Italy, Singapore, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom and India. His most recent solo exhibitions were at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, and at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Gallery, Karachi. His poems have been published in various literary journals in Pakistan and abroad. His art practice is, at its basis, an existential investigation into the contemporary human experience of urbanity; his premise being that the relentless force of globalisation and international uniformity only lead to a greater sense of estrangement and separation. Primarily narrative in nature, his work finds its voice in figures who confront the viewer, almost as if they are pleading for relief from distorted relationships and artificial interactions. As such, the actors in his bizzarist theatre attempt to elicit a response of self-recognition from the audience. His technical practice reveals a profound fascination, almost a primitive enjoyment, in the creative process of painting a surface, manipulating and cajoling the flow of paint on a plane to explore new directions and avenues in his artwork.

Faruqi’s diptych for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Clifton Bridge, represents a stylistic transition from his narrative-based work to a concern with forms. It experiments with abstraction, with his figures becoming part of schematic colour fields, dispossessing them of their individuality, symbolising the destruction of selfhood in the contemporary metropolis. Commenting on the new artistic direction displayed in his work, Faruqi states: “It is almost as if the figures have become part of the background, or a part of the larger scheme of fragmented blocks of color. The idea is to fabricate and present a new imagery, but also to reduce characters in the painting to mere forms, not personalities.” Whilst aesthetically a move away from his previous work, Clifton Bridge conforms to the general theme of urban existentialism in his art practice, highlighting Faruqi’s perpetual experimentation with the medium of painting as a means to explore this thematic.