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Lot Essay
Born in Simla in 1928, Anwar Jalal Shemza was initially a student of philosophy and languages including Arabic and Persian before he joined the Mayo School of Arts (now the National College of Arts), Lahore in 1944 to study painting. Following his graduation in 1947, the artist established a graphic design studio and taught art at a few institutions. A significant contributor to the city’s cultural life in the early 1950s and a champion of modernism in the art and literature of the new nation of Pakistan, Shemza was a founding member of the Lahore Art Circle, wrote several Urdu novels and plays and edited the literary journal Ehsas. In 1956, the artist left Lahore to study at London’s Slade School of Fine Art.
City Wall (lot 676), painted in 1960 after earning his diploma from Slade, reflects the early artistic and literary influences from his time in Lahore as well as the ancient and modern art from around the world that he spent so much time studying in the museums of London. His works from the period were elaborately constructed from simplified forms inspired by Islamic art and architecture, particularly calligraphy, as well as the work of modern Western artists like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. Dubbing Shemza’s work from the period ‘calligraphic modernism’, Iftikhar Dadi notes that “among the lessons he learned from Klee was the importance of surface as the plane of modernist experimentation rather than a stress on modelling, and the freedom and ability to deploy abstraction, geometry and pattern – much of it derived from Islamic art – towards modernist exploration” (I. Dadi, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction: Anwar Jalal Shemza’, Anwar Jalal Shemza, London, 2015, p. 12).
In City Wall, Shemza “depicts layers of walls constructed out of the squares and circles that characterise his oeuvre. The front one, which is red, is set on a ground of brown, dappled paint. Moving up the picture plane, in a classic modernist device, are other similarly constructed walls, making five altogether in receding colours: alizarin crimson, viridian green, ultramarine blue and grey. Above that is a cloudy ‘sky’ of white and yellow painted over black that stretches down behind the ‘walls’. In this piece the walls are transparent linear structures, through which the sky can be seen, but it is an impenetrable sky: the white pushes through the structures, bringing everything to the surface, setting up a push/pull that contradicts the deep space of the composition” (R. Garfield, ‘Navigating the British Landscape’, Ibid., 2015, p. 22).
Painted five years later in 1965, Untitled (lot 675) represents a disciplined and confident artist devoted to the exploration of the many possibilities of his unique idiom and modernist practice. Settled in Stafford with his young family, Shemza had reestablished himself as an educator and a celebrated artist in England with his work featured in several exhibitions at museums and commercial galleries including the New Vision Centre and Gallery One. While his well-documented repetitive use of the letters B and D from the Roman alphabet is clearer in City Wall, in this later and larger work on canvas “the calligraphic dimensions [...] draw from the sinuous lines of the Arabic alphabet as well, and thus venture far beyond rigid geometric abstraction, creating a tension between the two scripts” (I. Dadi, Ibid., 2015, p. 14).
Shemza continued to teach, create and exhibit his work till his untimely death in 1985. Since then, his works have been shown widely around the world and featured in major group and solo exhibitions including The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, which also travelled to Wolverhampton and Manchester; Anwar Shemza, a retrospective at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1997; the BP Display: Anwar Shemza at Tate Britain, London in 2015-16; and Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2016-17. Shemza’s works are also held in the permanent collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Tate, London, the British Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Lahore Museum, Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA), Islamabad, the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi among others.
City Wall (lot 676), painted in 1960 after earning his diploma from Slade, reflects the early artistic and literary influences from his time in Lahore as well as the ancient and modern art from around the world that he spent so much time studying in the museums of London. His works from the period were elaborately constructed from simplified forms inspired by Islamic art and architecture, particularly calligraphy, as well as the work of modern Western artists like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. Dubbing Shemza’s work from the period ‘calligraphic modernism’, Iftikhar Dadi notes that “among the lessons he learned from Klee was the importance of surface as the plane of modernist experimentation rather than a stress on modelling, and the freedom and ability to deploy abstraction, geometry and pattern – much of it derived from Islamic art – towards modernist exploration” (I. Dadi, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction: Anwar Jalal Shemza’, Anwar Jalal Shemza, London, 2015, p. 12).
In City Wall, Shemza “depicts layers of walls constructed out of the squares and circles that characterise his oeuvre. The front one, which is red, is set on a ground of brown, dappled paint. Moving up the picture plane, in a classic modernist device, are other similarly constructed walls, making five altogether in receding colours: alizarin crimson, viridian green, ultramarine blue and grey. Above that is a cloudy ‘sky’ of white and yellow painted over black that stretches down behind the ‘walls’. In this piece the walls are transparent linear structures, through which the sky can be seen, but it is an impenetrable sky: the white pushes through the structures, bringing everything to the surface, setting up a push/pull that contradicts the deep space of the composition” (R. Garfield, ‘Navigating the British Landscape’, Ibid., 2015, p. 22).
Painted five years later in 1965, Untitled (lot 675) represents a disciplined and confident artist devoted to the exploration of the many possibilities of his unique idiom and modernist practice. Settled in Stafford with his young family, Shemza had reestablished himself as an educator and a celebrated artist in England with his work featured in several exhibitions at museums and commercial galleries including the New Vision Centre and Gallery One. While his well-documented repetitive use of the letters B and D from the Roman alphabet is clearer in City Wall, in this later and larger work on canvas “the calligraphic dimensions [...] draw from the sinuous lines of the Arabic alphabet as well, and thus venture far beyond rigid geometric abstraction, creating a tension between the two scripts” (I. Dadi, Ibid., 2015, p. 14).
Shemza continued to teach, create and exhibit his work till his untimely death in 1985. Since then, his works have been shown widely around the world and featured in major group and solo exhibitions including The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, which also travelled to Wolverhampton and Manchester; Anwar Shemza, a retrospective at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1997; the BP Display: Anwar Shemza at Tate Britain, London in 2015-16; and Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2016-17. Shemza’s works are also held in the permanent collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Tate, London, the British Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Lahore Museum, Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA), Islamabad, the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi among others.