Super Realist Paintings by Akram Spaul

It seems at the ordinary when Akram Spaul brings in his still life oil paintings, a piece of furniture, a garden, washing area; infusing detail that brings it to life and brings our own routine activities into focus with stunning beauty. No doubt he is a classic super realist painter. Akram Spaul paints with delicate life like detail that explores his subject matter to life. His recent realistic oil paintings have taken him in surrealist region. Using the same modus operandi he adds components on to some canvases, like silent characters or wind, which put surrealistic gloominess to his works. However his main focus area remains a festivity of objects and achievements that define our daily lives. By recreating them in masterful technique, he gives them humor and three-dimensional vitality, reminding the viewers of objects that connect with moments in their own lives.

Spaul has distinctly various techniques and on the surface, very different subject matter. Their similarity lies ironically in their differences: the first purposely makes us think and question the choices we have taken as a society by recreating memories. The second recreates objects and activities that inadvertently meanders us through our individual memories.
Akram Spaul’s first exhibition was held in 1989. Now, with over 15 exhibitions to his credit in more than 21 years, he is going for solo shows. Themes of life and routine are explored with truthful and accurate depiction that contemporary life offers to the artist. Everyday activities are worthy subjects for him. He mostly paints and draw the lives and surroundings of the middle and lower classes, the ordinary and unadorned. He brings to attention the beauty that often is ignored in life around, especially the physical settings and material conditions. He focuses on accuracy of detail and colour.

Recently Akram was also part of Art auction at KOEL GALLERY for flood-relief fund-raising, 16-19 August 2010. On August 9th, Koel Gallery appealed to the artist community to donate one work of art for auction at the Gallery. The response by artists in Pakistan and abroad has been overwhelming. 88 artists generously donated one or more of their work resulting in 100 being displayed at Koel Gallery, and online.
In general we can say that modern art has been about destroying the illusionist idea of the picture as a window on reality, it was in the late 1960s and 70s that super realism art made its appearance in the United States as a rebellion against the emotional excesses of Pollock and de Kooning et al. So, in this sense, Akram’s work has similar pretensions to extreme objectivity. Many of his pictures are remarkable for their spotless execution.