Anwar Jelal Shemza (1928-1985)

Shemza: Paintings, Print and Drawings, Stafford College of Art, November - December 1964
Anwar Shemza, Solo exhibition, Brimingham Museum & Art Gallery, November 1997 - February 1998

F. Bruckmann KG, Fikrun wa Fann, issue 22, Munich, 1973, p. 78 illustrated

tacks and tack holes in each corner, colors slightly deeper in reality, as viewed
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Anwar Jelal Shemza was part of the triumvirate of artists from the subcontinent (along with F. N. Souza and Avinash Chandra) who showed together at Victor Musgrave's influential Gallery One in London in the 1960s. Shemza was well respected in London's critical circles, with notable one-man exhibitions in New Vision Centre (1959), Gallery One (1960), Durham's Gulbenkian Museum (1963) and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum (1964).

His works began to gather critical acclaim with his inclusion in the Hayward Gallery's landmark exhibition in 1989, The Other Story. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery held a retrospective of his work in 1998, and Ikon Gallery included him in their four artist show Typo (1999-2000), looking at how the design of text can affect meaning. Shemza's singular approach continues to attract interest with at least two ongoing art historical projects in the UK and the US researching his contribution to the development of the British landscape, and calligraphic abstraction in the 20th century.

Born in Simla, India in 1928, Shemza enroled at the Mayo School of Art (now National College of Art) in Lahore in 1944, where his training included miniature painting. He ran a graphic studio, edited the Urdu literary journal Ehsas and published several successful short novels in the 1950's, before leaving for the UK to study at the Slade School of Art. Following his training there he began a life-long quest to find his own distinctive voice. Over the subsequent twenty-five years, his painting and graphic work covered a broad range of ideas, including explorations of Roman letters, formal arrangements of circles and squares, and 'pages' of lines that seem inspired from Arabic and Persian calligraphy but are illegible.

The writer and critic, G.M. Butcher, writing in 1960, referred to Shemza's approach of working in series, developing and revisiting formal themes and visual ideas, as his 'research', and believed that it would 'supply one of the cultural roots so badly needed by Pakistan's future'. This view was shared by W. G. Archer, Keeper Emeritus of the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who saw in Shemza's 'clear, logical yet strangely beautiful work' a 'bold determination, a reasoned confidence' through which 'modern art in Pakistan may well evolve'.

But it is perhaps the critic Andrew Forge who put Shemza's effort in full perspective in a 1959 catalogue essay, 'The case of most artists from the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent is totally different ... They have in fact been faced with a double problem, to discover their own traditions as well as that of the West. Shemza is one of the exceptional instances of an artist prepared to take on this challenge.'

The present lot combines two visual motifs that recur in Shemza's career  — the city and the wall — constructed out of different combinations of the Roman letters B and D. In structure this work is similar to The Wall, a slightly larger painting in the collection of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery that was used as the catalogue cover for The Other Story exhibition.