Based on an imaginary colourful world Muhammad Atif Khan's solo exhibition titled "Mind Maps" at Canvas Gallery, Karachi captured the present day experiences along with Mughal era iconography in an imaginary land in search of love. Hence defining another configuration for everyday life.
Using his imagination and everyday life situations he managed to bring forward a world where everything becomes possible provided his imagination. He imagined a place where there were gardens and greenery, pigeons and tiny colourful fairies fly in the blue sky under white silvery clouds while fish swims in clear waters.
In his world things behave in an unusual and unexpected ways. Having bright and varied colours the imaginary scenes in his paintings were a delight to look at. The paintings depicted peaceful atmosphere where one forgets about the tensions of life and enjoys nature. Some of the paintings show the gardens with its unique view, design, structure and formation having lush green clusters of trees, blooming flowers and a lake in the centre. While others portrayed a Mughal emperor enjoying a horse ride.
The paintings were well composed narrating the tale the artist wanted to tell others in the simplest way. As we know the birds are symbols of freedom and fish as the continuation of life. Therefore he wanted to convey that our life needs freedom from the unseen shackles of our society.
His gardenscapes seemed to be the coexistence of real and surreal worlds. The gardens were imaginary with a touch of reality. Sometimes a lake was surrounded by trees but in other paintings trees were surrounded by water. All the paintings were enclosed in an oval shape just like earth. All the things on earth are related to each other and confined to this planet and it is because of gravity. This gravitational force keep all living and non-living things intact to this planet. Atif seemed to be much inspired by this phenomenon as when viewing his paintings the viewer saw an aerial view of the paintings as if they were looking at the paintings from a higher place.
He translated his thoughts and experiences in his work using archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper. His works captured the colourful world of his dreams. He played with imagination to create interesting situations and designs.
He also used heart symbolically in various thematic paintings depicting the hearts desire which occasionally became true but many a time remained just a dream. That's why the heart seemed to be flying in the sky also swimming in water and help flying a giant hot air balloon.
He was inspired by truck art also therefore his paintings showed vivid imaginations. The colourful paintings having multi-coloured fish and birds created a harmonic atmosphere that also engulf the viewers imagination taking him/her in another world - a world of their dreams where one can do whatever he/she wanted to do.