Tauseef Khan
A striking aspect of Tauseef’s paintings is the deliberate attention drawn to the artifice of the image. He paints realistic objects, not for the sake of verisimilitude, but paradoxically to underscore their transient nature. “I am inspired by the masterworks of Dutch Still Life painting, with the amazing tables full of precious objects, fruit and flowers, which the painters rendered with photographic precision. I work to achieve the same sort of hyper-realism in my works, so that the painting is at once very real but also something illusionary,” he explains. Like the anamorphic distortions of the Old Dutch masters, who painted distorted skulls in otherwise hyper-realistic compositions, to remind the viewer of the temporary nature of life, Tauseef’s glass screens too seem to tell us that all things are a function of time.