Anwar Jalal Shemza

Following his time at the Slade School in London in the mid-1950s, Anwar Jalal Shemza sought his own distinctive voice. He was initially influenced by western Modernists such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, but his later works incorporated traditional Islamic influences of architectural shapes and geometry. Over his celebrated career, his painting and graphic work covered a broad range of ideas, including explorations of Roman letters, Arabic and Persian calligraphy, and formal arrangements of circles, squares and chessboard figures.

'[Shemza's] paintings derive equally from the rhythmical space-filling patterns of the rug and from the 'growing line' of modern western art. His pictures are not mere patterns and images, and their forms, whether painted or drawn, invest the surface with a mysterious life.' (A. Forge quoted in Holt, 'Anwar Jalal Shemza: A Search for the 'Significant'', p. 107) 

In the 1960s, Shemza 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. Shemza was well respected in London's critical circles, with notable one-man exhibitions at New Vision Centre (1959), Gallery One (1960), Durham's Gulbenkian Museum (1963) and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum (1964). The current lot dates to this period of critical acclaim for Shemza and depicts important visuals motifs that continually recurred in the artist's career, namely a geometric grid of the letters B and D, rendered here in vibrant orange upon a ground of turquoise.

As an incredibly important figure for twentieth century South Asian art and modernism more widely, Shemza continues to be exhibited at international institutions. Last year alone. his work featured in the following important exhibitions: A Century of the Artists’ Studio: 1920-2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Postwar Modern - New Art in Britain 1945 - 1965 at the Barbican Centre, London and Radical Landscapes at the Tate Liverpool, Liverpool.