Anwar Jalal Shemza

“One circle, one square, one problem, one life is not enough to solve it”.

 - Translation of Urdu inscription on Anwar Jalal Shemza’s 1962 work One to Nine and One to Seven

The art of Anwar Jalal Shemza holds a multitude of influences. The artist sought inspiration in the modernist abstraction of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, as well as in patterns and shapes found in Islamic calligraphy, Mughal architecture and the letters of the Roman alphabet. Above all, it was the fundamental forms of the circle and the square which Shemza tirelessly explored in his work.  

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of great critical acclaim for Shemza. He was part of the triumvirate of artists from the subcontinent – along with Francis Newton Souza and Avinash Chandra – who showed together at Victor Musgrave's influential Gallery One in London in the 1960s. Shemza also held notable one-man exhibitions around England, at New Vision Centre (1959), Gallery One (1960), Durham's Gulbenkian Museum (1963) and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum (1964).

Painted in 1963, Square Composition 9 dates to this period of critical success and depicts the distinctive visual vocabulary for which the artist is lauded. Here, Shemza cleverly assembles simple forms into a complex yet perfectly balanced configuration. This painting is a powerful homage to the humble circle and square which helped to shape Shemza’s idiosyncratic practice.