Ghalib Baqar Profile

Ghalib Baqar

Born in Karachi on April 14, 1956, 59 year old Ghalib Baqar happens to be one of the finest water color artists of Pakistan. His first solo exhibition was held in 1983 and was inaugurated by noted scientist, intellectual and painter, Dr. Salimuzaman Siddiqui. In 1991, he had another solo exhibition at the Indus Art Gallery managed by Pakistan’s leading artist Ali Imam.

Ghalib Baqar has over 20 years of teaching experience with 7 solo and over 100 group exhibitions to his credit and bagged his first prize at Biennial International Competition of SAARC countries in 1988. He earned his diploma in fine arts in 1975 from the KSA as the youngest diploma. Ghalib Baqar’s watercolors are about the sovereignty of the medium and its semantics, which have been naturalised on the subcontinent for 200 years and lost their colonial patina. Baqar paints Karachi’s seaside and land, which appear as codes of their geography. On his refracted surfaces are remnants of houses, land, water, boats, foliage and the sky, which fussy and frenzied washes displace whichever way they will. The reflections into which the surface divides and multiplies itself demonstrate the way the medium performs under the painter’s hand. What he has yet to achieve is a vision which is intense and yet simple, veiled by the medium but free from the ruptures of the abstract expressionist manner.

Artworks by the Artist