Lot 75: TALHA RATHORE

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE UK COLLECTOR B. 1970 SEEKING, SEEPING, SPREADING VII; PEARLS WITHOUT A CLOUD IV Quantity: 2 Signed and dated in Urdu lower left Gouache, block print and paper collage on wasli 39 by 28.5 cm. (19 1/4 by 11 1/4 in.) Executed in 2007

Talha Rathore’s practice of Neo-miniature painting explores the ambiguity and sense of displacement and isolation in her own life suspended between the two countries that serve as her birthplace and her adopted home: Pakistan and the United States. Rathore places elemental amoebic forms over Manhattan subway maps in a collage using traditional materials and the centuries-old technique of wasli paper-making. “My work evolves mainly from organic forms,” says Rathore, “in the shape of trees, plants, flowers, seeds, and sometimes bacteria and viruses, which represent life, growth and change.” In earthy tones of reds, beiges and blue, the works show seeds, pods and microscopic bacteria in singular, dual, triple and quadruple formations. Her works are a personal metaphor for her reality, a microcosm of beliefs with hopes, aspirations and fears of having a life straddling two cultures. (A. Ali, ‘Myriad Minutiae,’ Newsline, October 2011) Rathore graduated from the Miniature painting department at the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1995 and studied on a UNESCO bursary at the Sanskriti Akademi in New Delhi in 1997. Borrowing from the visual idioms of traditional 18th century Basholi, Guler and Kishangarh miniature paintings, Rathore’s images are strikingly contemporary and yet both personal as well as universal in its deeper significance about the meaning of a home vs. homeland.