Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, London.

Rahi was born in Maldah, West Bengal, India but his family migrated to East Pakistan and settled in Rajshahi. He attended the Dhaka Government College of Arts and Crafts, and was taught by Zainul Abedin, Kibria and Aminul Islam. He moved to Karachi permanently in 1963, when he exhibited his works at the Karachi Arts Council and was subsequently offered the position of an art teacher with the Central Institute of Arts & Crafts. In 1965, he became the Principal of the Karachi School of Art and in 1982 he was appointed the Associate Professor of Art at the University of Peshawar.

Rahi's works can best be described as the amalgamation of the mannerisms propounded by cubism, the social commitment of the works espoused by his teacher Zainul Abedin as seen in Rahi's 1973 tortured drawings on the World Food Crisis of 1973, and the idyllic notions of Bengals rural life, which romanticised peasant life and rural culture. In Untitled (Bull), Rahi appears to be paying homage to Picasso, the father of cubism. Picasso's fascination with bulls continued throughout his eight-decade-long career, and the artist often featured the animal in his prints, paintings, and sculptures as a symbol for his national heritage as well as his personal desires. Here, Rahi has employed the cubist techniques of simple shapes and sharp lines and offset this with the fervent red background, illustrating passion and endurance.

Untitled (Abstract) on the other hand, looks at cubism through the lens of abstraction. Clusters of shapes meld together to form a distinct visual language, where objects of different sizes are piled upon each other. The layering of these conglomerations adds volume to the work evidenced by the thick impasto, and the colours of creams, whites and blacks are brought to life by the pops of pinks, reds and oranges, further adding to the sense of volume.