One scroll through artist and designer Furqan Jawed’s Instagram will sum up his approach to art. A marriage of clean visuals and witty words, providing you with imagery inspired by popular culture that has been twisted and subverted to create something new. “The semantics of everyday visual media excite me to create work which celebrate the quotidian and mundane, while questioning accepted conventions, often in the form of exaggeration or satire,” he explains. Instead of building something from scratch, Furqan’s practice deliberately references other works of art and other visual media that attempts to remould contexts.
The contribution of fashion to visual culture is what excited him to collaborate with ELLE for its 250th cover issue. “India is on the cusp of a social and cultural change and this relationship of fashion with visual culture is subliminally influencing identities in terms of a socio-political context,” he says.
Jawed was also featured in ELLE’s December 2015 issue as an artist to watch out for. He will soon be working in Mumbai’s historic Sassoon docks and his work will be on display for the first time at this year’s Street Art Mumbai festival. Make sure you catch it.
