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Lot Essay
Pakistani painter Anwar Jalal Shemza was a modernist pioneer and esteemed contemporary of Francis Newton Souza and Avinash Chandra, having exhibited with them both in London at Gallery One. He graduated from the Mayo School of Art in Lahore in 1947, the same year the Indian Subcontinent was divided under Partition. The legacy of Partition and the consequent fracturing of identity is a constant undercurrent in Shemza's practice. Shemza's modernist engagement already manifested itself in the early '50s when he founded the Lahore Art Circle, a group who championed abstraction of forms in painting. This love for abstraction would travel with the artist to London remaining with him throughout his career.
Although revered in his native Pakistan, Shemza's arrival in London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1956 heralded an existential crisis in terms of his own artistic and cultural identity. Torn between the Slade and the Eastern collections of the British Museum, Shemza himself remarked, [...] "the search was for my own identity. I was an exile, homeless, without a name." (A.J. Shemza cited in, Iftikhar Dadi, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Calligraphic Abstraction, accessed on May 4, 2012, https://www.arts.cornell.edu/histart/3/Dadi-Shemza-Perspectives1-2009.pd f)
It was the resolution of this introspective battle that allowed Shemza to combine the visual traditions of East and West, evolving his own unique eclectic visual language. Shemza's inspirations took from traditional Mughal decoration, Islamic geometric patterning and calligraphy, and fused it with Paul Klee's modernist exploration and insistence on surface and flatness in painting. The result of this was a rich and profoundly personal vernacular style. Even his signature preference to cloth over canvas as a working medium emphasized his marriage of such contrasting cultures.
Untitled (Black and white composition) and Green and Red Composition are eloquent triumphs of Shemza's Calligraphic Abstraction developed in the mid-1960s in London. The plethora of influences from East and West are distilled into a language of seemingly simple abstracted forms. Disciplined use of modular shapes and lines construct architectonic totems and primitive purity. Shemza has created his own formal building blocks fusing calligraphy and geometry. These blocks adhere to a strict visual code whereby the Roman letters 'B' and 'D' are the basic modules. These B/D building blocks of subtly abstracted geometries in black, white, reds, oranges and greens sprout from sturdy foundations. While foundations and roots would preoccupy Shemza's later work, it is this transnational and transcultural language of the B/D series which produces such a striking and decidedly modern aesthetic of experimentation and personal exploration.
Although revered in his native Pakistan, Shemza's arrival in London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1956 heralded an existential crisis in terms of his own artistic and cultural identity. Torn between the Slade and the Eastern collections of the British Museum, Shemza himself remarked, [...] "the search was for my own identity. I was an exile, homeless, without a name." (A.J. Shemza cited in, Iftikhar Dadi, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Calligraphic Abstraction, accessed on May 4, 2012, https://www.arts.cornell.edu/histart/3/Dadi-Shemza-Perspectives1-2009.pd f)
It was the resolution of this introspective battle that allowed Shemza to combine the visual traditions of East and West, evolving his own unique eclectic visual language. Shemza's inspirations took from traditional Mughal decoration, Islamic geometric patterning and calligraphy, and fused it with Paul Klee's modernist exploration and insistence on surface and flatness in painting. The result of this was a rich and profoundly personal vernacular style. Even his signature preference to cloth over canvas as a working medium emphasized his marriage of such contrasting cultures.
Untitled (Black and white composition) and Green and Red Composition are eloquent triumphs of Shemza's Calligraphic Abstraction developed in the mid-1960s in London. The plethora of influences from East and West are distilled into a language of seemingly simple abstracted forms. Disciplined use of modular shapes and lines construct architectonic totems and primitive purity. Shemza has created his own formal building blocks fusing calligraphy and geometry. These blocks adhere to a strict visual code whereby the Roman letters 'B' and 'D' are the basic modules. These B/D building blocks of subtly abstracted geometries in black, white, reds, oranges and greens sprout from sturdy foundations. While foundations and roots would preoccupy Shemza's later work, it is this transnational and transcultural language of the B/D series which produces such a striking and decidedly modern aesthetic of experimentation and personal exploration.