Description

Amna Asghar. Forever Yours. 20" x 14", Archival pigment print. Signed edition of 35. $250. Bollywood film stills and beauty advertisements with looping Urdu graphics are placed alongside luscious colors of Disney gradients in Amna Asghar's paintings. Her sharp assemblages combine watercolor, acrylic, airbrush and screenprinted sections that explore the construction of what surrounds identity. Asghar's iterations of her source material hybridize cultural elements and the poetics of mistranslation. The groupings of images become sonnets, couplets, remixed, like variations in music. The works become altered versions of their original sources. In Forever Yours, ripe painted figs are layered onto a CMYK print of a cropped Jean-Léon Gérôme painting, Napoleon and his General Staff in Egypt. With a dark block that alludes to a contemplative space between these images, a strip of vivid periwinkle pushes forward on the left, suggesting an overlapping of two disparate landscapes.