Iqbal Geoffrey

Geoffrey, a Pakistani artist born in 1939, has had an extraordinarily eventful career despite his youth. After having earned a law degree at 20 years of age, he was launched into the artistic world with a one man show in a London gallery. He is presently painting under the aegis of a Huntington Hartford Fellowship. On display at this fairly new Walnut Creek gallery are small gouache paintings, some mixed media works plus a number of ink drawings. The best pictures in the show possess a strong graphic quality enhanced by a natural spontaneity. The imagery used in the paintings is a variegated combination of Sanskrit writing adjacent to sans-serif type faces larded with mandala symbols and Arabic design motifs.

—James Monte