Galleries - October 2016

OCTOBER 2016 GALLERIES 57 its meaning, the repeated form of the drone, with its varying, vibrant patterns, starts to lose its identity and Chishty manipulates the perspective of it until it is abstract. The decorative elements, inspired by the traditional decoration on Afghan trucks, start to command more attention than their outline, and she manages somewhat to reclaim these weaponised aircraft by freeing them from their forms. At the Imperial War Museum’s contemporary art series, 19 October to 19 March. Frances Allitt Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Airplane Flying’ painted in 1915, is an abstract work, one of his purely geometric, Suprematist paintings made up of yellow and black rectangles on a blank background. He launched Suprematism the same year at the ‘The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10’. There, in an explanatory leaflet, which may or may not have been useful to visitors, he systematically laid out the thought process behind his new style of working: “I transformed myself in the zero of form , I destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring that confines the artist and forms of nature.” Today, Mahwish Chishty’s canvases are populated with drones, and though the engineering of these newer machines may be different from those early 20th century aircraft that Malevich would have known, Chishty also uses geometry to advance her subject. During a trip back to her native Pakistan, American-based Chishty was struck by the constant presence of drones and began painting them. She presents them with no background, or against minimal background patterns. The drones themselves, however, she gives exuberantly coloured geometric patterns - right down to the warheads falling from the drone in her 2011 work ‘MQ-9 Predator’. Like a word repeated until it loses above: Mahwish Chishty ‘MQ-9/2’ IWM London CODA