When He Left, He Did Not Say He Will Not Come
Wooden Bicycle
36x60x12 inches
2014
Omar Hassan’s Collection
Idrees Hanif believes that he is not making sculptures, he is remaking life. He is interested in manipulating objects to evoke personal experience, fuse the relationship between art and life, reality and invention. What one believes to constitute “truth” matters more in subject of individual action, social behavior, and personal creativity than any definition of traditional standards of the condition of being natural; usual, typical, or predictable?
Hanif employs objects and manipulates them to evoke one’s personal experience; working with materials like cement, plaster, wood, metal and transforming them. Hanif has recently started working with objects, subsequently refining his own conceptual and visual vocabulary that emerged through his focus on the point of intersection between reality and fiction. A point where one forgets the loud process and fuses his or her self with the art work. His diverse experimentation and reading of objects and their fusion with the material makes his work more mesmerizing and remarkable.
Idrees’s early sculptures are frequently simple, casted out in cement in such a way that material loses its identity and inflexibility with the object. When He Left He Did Not Say He Will Not Come is one of Hanif’s most intriguing pieces, reflective of his father’s bicycle, which he used to drop Hanif to school for 6 years. He manipulates and recreates the objects, infusing his association with the subject and his childhood memories to form new objects of affection.
Hanif graduated from Beaconhouse National University Lahore, with BFA (Distinction) in May 2014. Idrees exhibited his first work in Alhamra art gallery in 2010 followed by a group show Brierfield library Preston England 2013 and the BNU Degree Show 2014. He lives and works in Lahore.
Photo Credits | Mahbub Jokhio