Masood A. Khan

Masood A. Khan is a Karachi based self-taught artist practicing since the last three decades. Hailing from a South Indian background, Masood was born and grew up in a small town of Bangladesh, Kushtiya. After the fall of Dhaka in 1971, Masood’s family was confined to a concentration camp as prisoners of war in Allahabad as his father was in the Pak Army then.

Masood took up Banking as a profession which provided him a stable economic platform and enabled to devote time to his passion of painting.

After pursuing a formal education in art form a local art institution, Masood isolated himself from the art world for a period of four years which proved to be a journey of self discovery and rejuvenation before he returned to the art scene with a new view point and an identity which was truly his own. The recent body of work in this exhibition is a continuation of his past thirty appearances at various art galleries within Pakistan and abroad. At each appearance, he adopted a new vocabulary to paint the essence of truth with lines and layers.

As transparency is the quintessence of naked reality, it remains constant on Masood’s surfaces. With a blend of feelings, he expresses the reality around him through Realism combined with Modernism. In the remote recesses of his subconscious lies an effort to create a spiritual climate that touches the heart. Masood feels a new liberty when the beauty of every form is clear, visible and not overlapping each other creating a multidimensional view. He does not feel the need to distort the naturalistic forms as in Cubism or other isms of art.

Masood has externalized his outrage at the hypocritic religious social economics that cloaks and disguises our true intentions.

In his works, a world emphasizing the simplicity and joy of spiritual content versus the present contemporary situation with all its perils is evident. Masood has peeled off layer by layer, the fables that determine our lives. His work is a search for new possibilities in Realism.