Working in the genre of landscape painting, Mughees Riaz creates aesthetically beautiful works of art motivated by his relationship with his surroundings. Living in a fast, expanding city teeming with activity, he creates his own place and space. While painting work in sequences, he portrays as his subject, the river Ravi and its surrounds, under diverse conditions of light and atmosphere. At times the surface of the sky takes up almost the entire canvas, the sun filtering through pink tinged clouds. In other paintings, it is the water that predominates with a changing tempo. Mughees Riaz is also a portraitist and he explores the genre of the nude focusing on the form of a young male, posed in angles of sculpted grace. Again in this sequence the artist uses familiar objects; clay pots, a cat and crows to humanize the unearthly beauty of the subject of his work. Riaz’s nude introduces a mood of sad introspection.
