Life and its destruction: A major artist debuts in Berlin

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Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year 2013 looks set for international success, as a new show in Berlin shows

If you have not yet heard of Imran Qureshi (b. 1972), you are certain to do so in future. Qureshi, from Lahore in Pakistan, is Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2013 and has a breath-taking show at the bank’s new Berlin venue, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, which is a must-see if you are in the city before it closes on 4 August.

On entering, the first thing one sees is a self-portrait of the artist that is both obviously of our own time and yet equally in the tradition of miniature painting familiar to anyone who has seen Mughal art such as that shown recently at the British Library in London. The artist, in sweater and open-necked shirt, holds a flower between finger and thumb. He is framed by an oval shape that we shall see again in the first room of the show, although here it is partly covered in images of flies, and that frame is itself framed by a comparatively large area of gold leaf. Qureshi looks neither at us nor at the flower he holds, but seems to gaze at the flies or possibly out of the picture altogether.

Entering the first room, one is confronted by half a dozen large, oval and apparently abstract paintings. Some are placed vertically, others horizontally. Most are dark red or a  lighter shade; two are gold with some red paint, while one is mostly red but with a gold area at the foot down which red paint has been allowed to run. Closer inspection reveals that what at first appear to be random splodges of red paint are actually flower-like shapes, resembling chrysanthemums. The flowers, often seen as decorative features in Mughal art, here take up the whole canvas. The paint is blood-coloured. The flowers seem beautiful but sinister. I immediately think of Baudelaire’s title for his poems, Les Fleur du Mal – flowers of evil. These flowers seem created from spilt blood. In a video shown later in the exhibition, Qureshi says that his work is about ‘life and the destruction of life’.

Flowers, of course, are associated with both weddings and funerals – life and death. In Dutch still life paintings, their imminent corruption symbolizes the transience of life. Poppies that grew on the site of the Battle of Verdun in Flanders (1916) have ever since symbolized the loss of soldiers in battle:

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
(In Flanders Field, John McCrae)

These images have titles such as Give & Take (2013), Together (2013) and Bleed (2013), the last being the one with the gold area at its foot, the red paint that has run over it looking disturbingly like blood. The blood-flowers are bleeding.

The use of gold leaf in Bleed and two of the other paintings (They Shimmer Still, 2013) is on a scale probably unimagined by the makers of Mughal miniatures. Neither would they have imagined the sight that greets me as I enter the next room. Here, large pieces of paper covered in fragments of drawings emerging from washes of red paint have been scrunched up and piled on the floor. One glimpses the flower images on these apparently discarded sheets. The mountain is well over head-height, and apparently contains 18,000 pieces of paper. It is titled And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood(2013) – and indeed the work suggests blood-soaked rags, somewhat washed out, as though used to mop up the blood of numerous victims of some terrible assault and then discarded in the rain. The title is taken from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84), a Pakistani poet and controversial left-wing figure who, in 1990, was nonetheless posthumously awarded the country’s highest civil honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence). The poem relates to deaths that should have been investigated but were not.

The large scale of these works does not prepare one for the next stage of the exhibition. A dark opening leads into an area that is the antithesis of the conventional ‘white cube’ in which the previous works are set. Here the gallery becomes a network of claustrophobic, black-walled chambers or cells, with downlighters providing enough light to move around while maintaining the feeling of being in darkness. The walls of a small central area have a number of openings leading to a network of small cells, each of which contains a one or two very small but exquisitely detailed paintings, spot-lit to allow the gold leaf to glitter. For again, many of these images, collectively titled Opening Word of this New Scripture (2013), have areas of gold leaf. Again, the blood red paint is ubiquitous.

The presentation lends a darkly magical quality to the experience of these images. In one wall there is a window that gives sight of a cell that one cannot enter, its floor splattered with the blood-red paint, as if one or more people had met a violent end there. One wanders through the labyrinth from one dark cell to another, mounting a flight of stairs to see further paintings. The tiny paintings, superficially resembling the pages of a book of Mughal miniatures, similarly all convey the sense of violence without ever depicting it.

In two images, for instance, a shirt hangs on a line. In each case, red paint is used to suggest blood stains, and blood dripping from the shirt. In others, the ‘page’ is covered by writing overlaid by drawings and paint. In some areas of paint are visible tiny versions of the ‘chrysanthemum’ flower shapes seen on the large canvases outside. In one, flower shapes seem to bleed, with trails of ‘blood’ stretching both downwards and upwards from them.

Traditional Mughal walled gardens appear in a number of these paintings – but used very differently from what one sees in Mughal painting. In one a man kneels, apparently painting, but the ground around him is overlaid with spatters of dark red. The wall surrounding his ‘garden’ is of bricks – gold on the outside, red within. Another painting shows the walled garden but there is no one there, only more spatters of red, which themselves resolve into the ‘chrysanthemum’ shapes. Yet another shows the walled garden apparently sunken and filling with red.

A short film about Imran Qureshi, in not-always-clear English with German subtitles, is shown continuously between the first gallery and the shop. He is shown painting like Jackson Pollock, canvas on the floor, spattering red paint into which he later draws the flower shapes, while talking about his work. A flight of stairs leads to a mezzanine level with dark red walls, where some older works are shown. Again, these resemble Mughal miniatures in size and detail, and in the presence of writing, which underlies some images. The subject matter is, however, far from that depicted in traditional miniatures. In all, one or more rockets are depicted – are they for space exploration or are they missiles? The answer comes in a few of the titles: Missiles in Series (2000) and Beginning of an End (2000). So again the notion of violent death is evoked here.

The earliest in the series is Love Story (1999), where a single rocket is covered in what appear to be green leaf shapes. It points up towards an area of writing that is stained as if by a water mark. Missiles in Series features a row of little upright rockets. Above them a red tree sprouts against a ground of irregular pale and darker green stripes. The darker stripes are themselves made up of a pattern of the green leaf shapes. In Beginning of an End, a single missile is placed horizontally across the foot of the ‘page’, again with the red tree and green ‘leaf’ pattern above. All these images suggest the imminence – and pervasiveness – of war: not a specific war, but war as a universal threat.

These paintings are singly and collectively both beautiful and disturbing, delicate and visceral. It is easy to connect them with the current situation in Pakistan, but the artist says that they relate to all violence. Indeed, despite the connections between the techniques of miniature painting and the Indian subcontinent, these images are non-specific and cannot be linked to particular events or circumstances. Bloodshed, like flowers and leaves, is universal.

This is Qureshi’s first major European show. After closing in Berlin in August it will travel to  Rome, to the Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma. Qureshi’s work is also displayed at this year’s Venice Biennale (opened Saturday 1 June) and in an installation for the roof garden of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, currently on view until 3 November 2013. So wherever you are, you are likely to be hearing more about Imran Qureshi.