A posthumous retrospective of the artist Mashkoor Raza’s (1948-2025) work was held at Mainframe Gallery, Karachi. The show opened a window into the late modernist period in Pakistani art (1970s and 1980s), during which abstract and semi-abstract art enjoyed huge popularity.

Raza was a prolific painter. His prodigious output can be gauged from the number of works on display that have come from his family’s collection. Raza graduated from the Karachi School of Art in 1972, where he had painted under the tutelage of Mansoor Rahi. He subsequently became a teacher at the school that had nurtured his love for painting.

Raza’s output in the 1970s consisted of anodyne abstractions in oil that appealed to the expanding bourgeois segment of society. Pakistan was settling its tremors after the cataclysmic parting of East Pakistan during this decade. Like many Pakistani modernists, Raza’s art avoided allusions to politics or narrative depictions. His abstractions differed from the querying mood of Zubeida Agha’s work or the raucous riot of colour in Ahmed Parvez’s compositions. Instead, they offered decorative comfort and a release from the angst of the world.

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