Amin Gulgee

Amin Gulgee (born 1965) is a Pakistani visual artist and curator.

His work encompasses sculpture, primarily in copper and bronze, installations, and performance art.

He currently lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan.

Gulgee was born in Karachi, Pakistan.

His father was the modernist painter Ismail Gulgee.

He received a BA in Art History and Economics from Yale University in 1987 and won the A. Conger Goodyear Fine Arts Award for his senior thesis on Mughal gardens.

Whilst doing his second major in Art History at Yale University, Gulgee was drawn into art, despite intending not to be an artist.

Writing his thesis on Mughal gardens—which led to conversations with Oleg Grabar, his secondary thesis advisor—ignited his interest in Islamic art.

He was attracted to the principles of repetition, symmetry, and geometric pattern.

His first body of work was jewellery created whilst living in New York.

Nina Hyde, then Washington Post fashion editor, wrote:

"'His jewellery is made from elements rarely worn by the wealthy women of Pakistan, who prefer gold and precious stones… even when he uses such unlikely materials as cowbells, nails and washers in his pendants, they rave – and wear them.'"

These pieces were large and heavy.

He showed them at the Pakistani American Cultural Centre, Karachi, in 1988.

He moved to Karachi in 1989, and immediately started to prepare for his first solo exhibition (1990) at a commercial gallery.

Unable to buy his own equipment, Gulgee would work with the panel-beaters and metalworkers from 12 am to 4 am, when the rates were lowest.

It was primarily in this environment that he learnt his craft.

Upon returning from almost six years in the United States, Gulgee felt a wanted to engage with the South Asian imagery he had grown up with.

His parents were collectors of antiquities, so he was surrounded by statues of Krishna, Buddha, and Ganesh, as well as Islamic metalwork.

He appropriated this South Asian religious imagery in copper and bronze, juxtaposing these with calligraphic forms from Quranic text.

Simultaneously, his jewellery became more wearable.

Throughout the nineties, Gulgee became involved in the burgeoning Pakistani fashion scene after the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq, who had introduced strict Islamic legislation into Pakistan.

At this point, fashion was theatrical and experimental, providing a stage for Gulgee's objects.

Gulgee sculpts in copper and bronze.

He does not "sketch or draw [his] work" in the process, allowing a certain freedom, as described by Islamic art historian Oleg Grabar:

"…works by Gulgee bewilder us by the variety of their expressions, by an apparent freedom in technique and design, by the range of pleasures they offer… It is clear that Gulgee is trying to find the limits of a sculptor's art… he gives pleasure to the senses and excites the mind."

Gulgee's sculpture has spanned over three decades to date.

His interest in form has gravitated towards both the organic and geometric.

Within the geometric, he primarily works with the cube and the sphere.

In two series, Char Bagh (2003 onwards) and Cosmic Chapati (2011–13), he has tried to reconcile the circle/sphere and the square/cube.

A Char Bagh is an Islamic garden designed to a quadripartite plan: two lines intersect at a perpendicular, and one is able to draw a circle or a square around the edges.

In these sculptures, he juxtaposed the sphere and the cube in quarters.

In the Cosmic Chapati series, the round chapatis are formed by concentric circles of copper wire, creating and dividing the space within a cube.

His calligraphic work centres on repetition.

Over the years, he has only used two lines from the Quran in a specific script.

One is from the Iqra chapter: "God taught humanity that which it did not know", in the Naskh script.

The other is from the Ar-Rahman chapter: "Which of the favours of God would one deny?", in the Eastern Kufic script.

In his earlier works, these lines could be read, but later they became deconstructed and illegible.

For Gulgee, remaining in these parameters is a fruitful challenge, and form becomes as important as content.

In contrast to these more organic series of works, he has repeatedly used the invocation of "Alhamdullilah", in the Square Kufic script.