Rijksakademie 2021: Abul Hisham
Abul Hisham is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is a painter with a BFA (Painting) Government College of Fine Arts, Thrissur, Kerala and an MFA (Painting), S.N. School of Arts, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad.
His practice intends to explore the notions of desire, death and memory. He is interested in how these notions intertwine within our social and cultural spaces. Motivated by the narratives evolving within socio-political and cultural spheres he draws from cinema, pop culture, art history, mythology and religion. He sometimes uses personal mythologies to depict his perspective and he enjoys allowing the viewer to decipher many metaphors & symbols for themselves.
For over the last decade, Abul has been using soft pastel as his primary medium. The experience of working with the powdered pigment is like sculpting from dust in keeping with the Christian and Islamic belief that humans were created from dust to which they return after death. Some of the pastel pigments he uses are made from mined minerals themselves part of the cycle of creation and transformation over millennia. However, during the past year at the Rijksakademie, Abul has expanded his practice in size and dimensions and to include working with wood, paint, dust powder and ceramics.
In the post below we have published photographs of Abul’s works and studio.
Dome, mixed media on wood
Portrait of a lawyer, mixed media on wood
Top Image: Abul with King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, King of the Netherlands at the Royal Prize Show.
