Waqas Khan
By Jonathan Jones
‘Look at these,” says Waqas Khan. “I call them Jali. They’re Islamic windows.” I look, as he urges, at the unglassed stone windows from Agra that are installed all around us in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia gallery. If you have ever visited it, you will have seen them, but not everyone looks as closely as Khan. “Look at the repetition,” he says. “You can see it in all these patterns.”
He means this as praise – and it’s easy to see the beauty of that apparently infinite repetition. The yellowish sandstone window grilles have a dazzling range of designs – floral, crystalline, triangular – in every window, interlocking and extrapolating and expanding with a complex regularity that looks as if it may go on for ever, far beyond these cooling lattices.
The first time I saw the work of Waqas Khan was in the Jameel prize here at the V&A in London. His microscopically precise yet vastly conceptualised abstract drawings took the art heritage of the Islamic world into a modern, ethereally beautiful new vision. Since then, he has expanded his art into big abstract canvases, adding a painterly feel for colour to his graphic brilliance. He is one of the most exciting abstractionists of our time.
He’s also an artist with rich historical roots. We are here to look at the V&A’s remarkable collection of art from India and Pakistan ahead of The Great Mughals, a blockbuster exhibition that overlaps with Khan showing his own work in the UK, at Purdy Hicks in London. The Great Mughals aims to unveil the art and architecture of the early Mughal empire, from 1560 to 1660. If that sounds specialist, think again. In fact, think Taj Mahal.
That unique building in Agra, where all the V&A’s Jali come from, is indisputably among the world’s most beautiful. It was raised by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1631 and its famous story is wildly romantic: he built this filigree weightless wonder as a tomb for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Its delicate embodiment of passion is typical of the early Mughals, who liked to have themselves portrayed literally smelling the flowers. “They loved the beauty around them,” says Khan.
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