Sadequain

The previous owner was given the work as a gift from the artist. She taught art history at The Central Institute of Arts & Crafts, Karachi, where Syed Ali Imam served as principal. 

Thence by descent to the current owner

There is rubbing and loss along the edges of the canvas notable in the lower left corner, the left edge as well as a small loss with surrounding craquelure in the center left of the work. Minor buckling in the lower right corner is visible only upon very close inspection. The painting is in good overall condition, as viewed.
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Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi, also known as Sadequain Naqqash or Sadequain, was a self-made, self-taught painter, and completely untraditional. While his works suggest a strong confluence of Cubism and Constructivism, he distorted his figures in a pioneering and creative way. He initiated himself to visual images of transnational modernism much before his travels to Europe– indirectly through magazine illustrations. Choosing not to go down the mimetic route, he sought to create rather than copy.

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries from both Pakistan and India, Sadequain’s influences not only stemmed from Western art, but from a myriad of sources including his Muslim faith. Following Independence in 1947, Pakistani artists began to salvage ethnic artistic traditions, primary among which was the revival of the Mughal miniature tradition mastered by the iconic painter, Abdur Rahman Chughtai (see lot 45). Calligraphy was one of Pakistan’s oldest and most venerated ancient art forms and was used as a tool for the devout to express their faith. Over the centuries, it declined in popularity and was consigned to a second-class status until Sadequain adapted this medium in the 1960s, transforming it into a mainstream art form. This profoundly influenced a generation of artists thereafter and he was responsible for the renaissance of Islamic calligraphy in Pakistan. Sadequain was also moved by the landscape and the natural forms present in the countryside around Karachi. This amalgam of inspirations is what makes his works truly unique.

‘One cannot label his work with any of the usual titles. He is not abstract although some of his large compositions inspired by the Kufi forms, came very near to it. Nor is he a surrealist despite the fantastic nature of many of his paintings…. He transforms [forms of nature] into a world of his own by the force of his imagination’ (Barnett D. Conlan quoted in I. Dadi, ‘Sadequain and Calligraphic Modernism,’ Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, p. 156).

The 1960s is considered to be the most prolific and creative period in his entire oeuvre. This work is a classic example of Sadequain’s signature cross-hatching technique along with his predilection for cactus shaped limbs and figures. The cacti first appeared in his art in 1957 when he encountered these long and prickly plants during a self-imposed period of seclusion on Karachi’s barren seacoast village of Gadani. The cacti became his alter-ego- a symbol of life and endurance in a hostile environment. Thereafter he used this imagery extensively in his work in different variations – one of these was the Sun series of paintings, as seen in this work featuring a red sun casting its rays on a cactus plant resulting in a luminous hide-and-seek of light.

In an interview Sadequain acknowledged the significance of these forms in his work- “[i]n the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy. Everything that I have painted since then – a city like Rawalpindi, buildings, a forest, a boat, a table or a chair, a man, a mother and child, or a woman- has been based on calligraphy, which in itself issues from the structure of the cactus” (ibid., p. 150). Noted art historian, Iftikhar Dadi has attributed these silhouettes suggestive of calligraphic forms to the “existential angst reminiscent of Giacometti’s sculptures” (ibid.). He further comments, “[t]ransformed by his cactus epiphany, Sadequain’s paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s show his reworking of the modernism of the likes of Picasso and Matisse…and of abstract expressionists like Mark Tobey, who emphasized linear, abstract calligraphy inspired by the Chinese script, or a movement towards forms inspired by the Arabic script" (ibid.).