Unver Shafi Khan

Born in 1961 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Unver Shafi Khan set up his studio in Karachi in 1984 after returning from Kenyon College, USA with a BA in English Literature. His first solo show, in 1986, was at the Indus Gallery run by the iconic Ali Imam. This came about because of a meeting at the gallery with the late Dr Akbar Naqvi, F.N. Souza and Ali Imam. At that time, Unver met sporadically with Amin Gulgee, Durriya Kazi, Huma Bhaba, Naiza Khan, Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi, David Alesworth and Moeen Faruqi, as well as with Ardy Cowasjee, who opened the short-lived but influential Ziggurat Gallery in Karachi. It was in these early years that the artist also befriended the late Zahoor ul Alkhlaq, who stayed with him and worked in his studio towards his first show at Ziggurat. And the rest, Unver says, “is history.”

Unver Shafi Khan has created a giclee print on canvas based on a painting in acrylic for KB17. The image is of a large pink pig. Art critic Saquif Hanif has written of the artist and his oeuvre: “If the larger oil paintings are exercises in virtuosity and control and hinged mostly on solitary forms, the meticulously observed acrylic ‘miniatures’ collectively titled as the Fabulist series [as in taking inspiration from traditional fables] use a striking jewel-like visual narrative full of sexual wit and innuendo. This narrative content is drawn from a host of arts and crafts traditions and these paintings provide a sense of looking past the edge of the ordinary world into the domain of the phantasmagoric. Those made uncomfortable by the ostensible disjunction between Unver’s large work and these miniature scaled paintings need not be unduly alarmed as they share a common pictorial ethos. It is all there for the main part-the choice of the human figure as the basic unit of art, the saturation of colour, the mastery of rhythm, the sexuality, the relentless sense of fun- the only difference being one of scale and technique. The paintings in both mediums are profligate in their wholesale abandonment to feelings and flat-out appeal to the senses.”