Ahmad Zakii Anwar opts to show Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the 20th century’s greatest art icons, in a relaxed mood hat and shoes, in loose black shirt and tweed pants, with his legs astride and hands in pockets, instead of half-naked busy with his painting or sculptures in his studio. He is without doubt one of the most written-about artists including books by his biographer Roland Penrose, and the one written in New Journalist techniques, Picasso: Creator And Destroyer by Arianna Huffington, nee Stassinopoulous. Picasso famously said: “Art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth.” How his Cubist concoctions of figures and still-life represent this point is moot. Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s mid-career survey exhibition, Disclosure (Galeri Petronas, 2008), sums up his redoubtable talent and great impact since he gave up a lucrative advertising art career to go full-time into Fine Art, especially with his Smokers series, starting his Urban Realism brand, in his solo at Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur in 1997. In 2007, he was selected for the Tyler Print project in Singapore, where he had a solo. His overseas solos also include the United States (Presence, 1999; Sinews, 2011), Indonesia (Kota Sunyi, 2007), Hong Kong (Shadowland, 2001) and South Korea (Baik Art, 2013). He graduated in Graphic Design at the Mara Institute of Technology in 1977.