Tanzara Gallery is privileged to present yet another solo exhibition by Irfan Cheema, titled “all is vanity”. As a gallery that has accompanied the artist across the arc of his career, it remains witness to the refinement of a visual language that continues to deepen in resonance and complexity. This exhibition brings together a new body of work in which Cheema expands his long-standing exploration of beauty, impermanence, contemplation, and the subtle thresholds between the seen and the felt.

The artist’s recurring use of birds, fruit, and foliage draws from classical still life symbolism and extends beyond conventional allegory. Birds function as agents within the narrative architecture of the paintings, being witnesses to abundance, participants in decay, and embodiments of histories that exceed their visual elegance. Pomegranates, grapes, apples, and other botanical forms operate as markers of ripening, rupture, and decline, thus forming a visual grammar of impermanence. The Kashmiri shawls, rendered with exceptional attention to textile structure and woollen tactility, anchor the works in the lived craft traditions of the Subcontinent. Stone ledges, camphor leaves, extinguished or unlit lamps introduce a temporal dimension that underscores the vanitas framework: these are images in which beauty is always provisional, always at risk, always subject to time.

“all is vanity” is therefore not a moralising statement but an inquiry:

How do objects accrue meaning? How does beauty survive, or fail to survive, across geographies, empires, and personal histories? What remains when desire and temporality converge in a single frame?

In Cheema’s hands, still life becomes a site of both critical reflection and visual seduction, reminding us that every act of looking is already an encounter with time’s slow, inevitable undoing.

“all is vanity” is his 11th solo show.