Pace Prints will release a print by Shahzia Sikander online to support the presentation of the exhibition “Collective Behavior” in Venice, during Biennale Arte 2024, and in Cincinnati, in 2025. “Disruption as Rapture” (2024) is a photogravure and relief print, in an edition of 35. The print will be available Thursday, April 4, at 11am New York time, exclusively on paceprints.com. The complete edition will be offered for direct purchase online on a first-come, first-served basis.
The edition “Disruption as Rapture” is linked to the animation work of the same name, which will be on view in “Collective Behavior.” The works reference an eighteenth-century illustrated manuscript of the “Gulshan-i ‘Ishq” (Rose Garden of Love), a North Indian Hindu love story recast as a Sufi tale and created for an Islamic court in south-central India. The story recounts the challenges lovers must overcome to be united, with the image of the garden recurring throughout, symbolizing the sought-after fulfillment of their love.
In the print, Sikander presents the garden as a dense and opulent thicket surrounding a pool, where several winged female figures appear elusively, as if in transitional states. The colors of the image, laid down in a continuously blended gradient of four oil-based inks, shift from verdant foliage, to cool turquoise, to citrus orange. Above the pool, a bright cloud of yellow suggests an apparition, to which the bathing figures offer welcoming gestures.
Shahzia Sikander - Disruption as Rapture - 2024
Medium: Photogravure and relief print.
Size: 21 x 14 in.
Edition of 35
Signed and numbered.
Price: $ 2,500
This Shahzia Sikander print will be available Thursday, April 4, at 4PM BST from Pace Prints.
