Alluding to his show of 17copper sculptures and an installation works ‘Through the Looking Glass’ curated by Elizabeth Rogers; Karachi-based artist Amin Gulgee, says ‘When I enter my workshop it is like falling through the looking glass. It is a world where everything is curiouser and curiouser. This is my private space in which forms and concepts that have been incubating in my mind acquire a physical reality. The process is an act of relinquishment. It is an endless journey where questions have no answers but only lead to more questions.’
He draws his inspiration from history, memory and the self, embedded within this, manifesting itself through architectonic and organic forms. Leaves and chapatis are the expressions of the natural and the appropriated nature or human, interconnected and interdependent on each other. The contradistinction between the two worlds is marked, by the fluidity in the way Gulgee moulds the former and the rigid contours of the chapatis, nevertheless there is also a similitude in texture and vocabulary. His sculptures use the harf, or letters that form world in arabesque calligraphy as visual and as text both. Calligraphy has extensively been used as a decorative and spiritual device in Islamic architecture and painting, and is a very powerful instrument in mediating between the mundane and the sacred worlds. His sculptures interpret these letters as ascending upwards, as if in an ecstatic union with Allah, as in sema or the whirling dance of the Sufi dervishes and murshids. There is also a very fascinating wall perforated with calligraphic verses or window, like a lattice or a jali, that seems to mediate between this world and the other, between the physical and the spiritual, between personal and the public, uniting dualities.
Curator Elizabeth Rogers, feels that Gulgee’s works harness ‘the power of form, welded metal, turning from earthen ores into spiralling, structurally composite visions of a creative mind, speaks across linguistic, temporal, and aesthetic definitions.’