Images of Awakening: Buddhist Sculpture from Afghanistan and Pakistan

This exhibition highlighted the Buddhist artistic heritage of ancient Gandhara, a region once heralded as the Crossroads of Asia and now located in present-day northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Following the conquest of Alexander the Great during the 4th century BCE, the region of Gandhara became a nexus point of diverse and evolving cultural influences. This remarkable cultural milieu led to the fusion of Hellenistic and later Roman cultural traditions with the artistic expression and religious worldview of the Indian subcontinent. The result was what is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive schools of ancient and early medieval Buddhist art, a product of this unprecedented encounter between the Eastern and Western worlds.

Included in this exhibition were examples of sculpted imagery from early-period Gandharan Buddhist art (1st – 3rd centuries CE), a rare assemblage of stucco images representing the later cosmopolitan stucco style of Hadda school of sculpture (4th – 5th century CE) and select examples of early medieval sculptures (6th – 7th century CE) reflecting the new trajectories in Buddhist sculpture and the enduring legacy of the classical Gandharan style.