A circle - a square - a puzzle - for which a lifetime is not enough. Anwar Jalal Shemza

Transcription

1 Anwar Jalal Shemza

2 A circle - a square - a puzzle - for which a lifetime is not enough. Anwar Jalal Shemza

3 Anwar Jalal Shemza Square Compositions Mysticism and modernism seem to go hand in hand, but when we think of ecstasy, when we consider the frenzy of the body moving to music, whether the guttural voice of Qawalli devotional music, the deep drums of contemporary House or the improvised insistent beats of Jazz, we rarely consider their visual parallels to be carefully controlled circles and squares. Yet, in Anwar Shemza s series of Square Compositions (1963), this is precisely what comes through. Critics of Shemza s work have noted the rhythmic undulations of line in many examples of his lithographs, paintings and drawings. Born in 1928 in Simla, Kashmir, Shemza trained as an artist in 1947 at the Mayo School of Arts after successfully establishing himself as a writer within the pre-partition literary and artistic circles of Lahore. Working within the Punjab School created by Abdur Rahman Chughtai, he made a name for himself painting lyrical images with a variety of themes drawn from Hindu and Mughal sources, much as Abanindranath Tagore, the pioneer of West Bengal modernism, had done from 1905 onwards. In 1956, Shemza enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and embarked on a journey that radically altered his practice, from the fine, linear, figurative images of his established work to a deep-seated engagement with the Islamic roots of western modernism. Anwar Jalal Shemza Exhibiting his work widely from the mid-1950s in London, Lahore and internationally, Shemza s paintings drew on calligraphy and architecture in Islamic art as the basis of his inspiration while looking closely and extensively at the modernist abstraction of Mondrian, Klee and Kandinsky. No doubt these artists are quite different from each other, yet they all attribute their development of abstraction in part to the twodimensionality and flat surfaces of Islamic geometric design, showcased in a major exhibition on Islamic art in Munich in Furthermore, as part of the development of abstraction, these artists drew heavily on the mystical traditions embedded in Madame Blavatsky s writings on theosophy. The link between creativity and mysticism is not new to Sufism, which expresses love of the divine through poetry that is also sung and set to music. What is emerging, gradually, are its connections with modernism.

4 As we know from Nada Shabout s excellent Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007), Sufism for the Iraqi modernist artist Shakir Hassan Al Said can also be understood as a mode of artistic consciousness through which the artist progresses, much as the Sufi travels, in a spiritual journey closer to a union with the divine. That much of this unfolding of being and consciousness is centred on the line is also pertinent to Shemza s work. In earlier paintings such as The Wall (1958), circles and squares are assembled to denote the letters B and D in varying degrees of scale across a deep ochre surface: the letters and shapes are larger at times, creating more loosely formed nets, and tighter in other instances, and this effect suggests an organic rhythmic movement that shifts and changes all the way across, reminiscent of a dancing body, however with no sense of the hand meandering. The Wall, 1958 Indeed, the connections between Abstract Expressionism and Jazz as improvised forms are well known. The seemingly improvised structures of the dripped paint in numerous Jackson Pollock paintings evoke his body, moving in and out of the canvas. More readily associated with the rhythmic movements of a dancing body, Shemza s early works are suggestive of music as well. The Square Compositions, by contrast, suggest a more mechanical process, closer to the controlled machine aesthetic of International Constructivism. Mondrian s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-3) is a notable exception, homage to the grid structure of New York city and its vibrant, insistent sounds, arguably the city s most original contribution to western music: Jazz. In Shemza s Square Compositions, combinations of circles and squares, the negative and positive spaces created by circles on contrasting backgrounds, reveal a dance of colour, line and shape, moving from canvas to canvas and echoing one another. The green and red of Square Composition 1 contrasts vividly with the red and blue of Square Composition 2, the repetition of circles and the colour red offset as the background colour comes to the foreground and red becomes blue. The arrangement of circles changes in Square Composition 2, where a pair of smaller circles sits to one side, reduced in scale and set against a dark black background. Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Even as I write, I am uncomfortable with this easy suggestion of background and foreground the canvas flat structures refuse such analysis. The marbling effect

5 that replaces blocks of colour suggests an attention to the surfaces of architecture. In Square Composition 3 and 6, this sense of building blocks is increased and also denied. To repeat a form and subtly change it is to rethink this repetition. Certainly, this series, with numbers as titles, is intended to be sequential repetition here is recreation, a movement of the same yet within a different register, echoing and returning us to the last image. This backward and forward and cyclical movement denies the sequential organisation of images as a build up towards a crescendo. Nor are the choices of colours and forms as tightly united as one might find in a sequence by Mondrian, with their reorganisation of three primary colours, and black and white, within structures that were always vertical or horizontal. Shemza gives us more, so much more. Square Composition 6 divides the circles into yellow and black halves, and here we are back to that wonderful play of suns and moons that frequently enters his work. In Square Composition 7, the division of suns into halves slips once more into a calligraphic shift between letters and shapes, giving us hints of Bs and Ds that refuse to coalesce into anything other than colours, lines and negative and positive surfaces of space, carrying the eye beautifully round the canvas: from the central small forms that jump out with their background colours of yellow, green and red, to echoes of half circles on the outer right side of the canvas, moving on to the suspended half moons above. Square Composition 1, 1963 Round and round and round we go, like a Dervish s constant circling, though these circles seem measured, calculated, carefully positioned one might imagine, after a great deal of change. This sense of circularity is also one that, because of the singularity of the image, we see and experience all at once. Even as the eye takes me on a dance, I keep the whole of the composition in my head. Until, Square Composition 10 presents a surprise that stops me dead in my tracks: its ochre mottled surface offers a sense of repose and relative calm, denying the rhythm I had become accustomed to. I catch my breath, but as my heart begins to return to normal, the dance begins anew and I am taken elsewhere on a journey towards a different horizon of setting and rising suns. Amna Malik, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, January 2014 Square Composition 2, 1963

6 Square Composition 3, 1963 Square Composition 6, 1963 Square Composition 7, 1963

7 Anwar Jalal Shemza Biography Anwar Jalal Shemza was born in Simla, India in He received his BFA from the Mayo School of Arts (now National College of Arts) in Lahore, before enrolling at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1956). While living in London he showed alongside FN Souza and Avinash Chandra at Victor Musgrave s Gallery One, and had solo shows at both Gallery One (1960) and the influential New Vision Centre (1958). His work has been exhibited widely, including the 6th Triennial of World Art, New Delhi, 1956; 5th Exhibition of International Prints, Moderna Galerija, Ljublijana, 1963; Graphische Sammlung, Vienna, 1963; Treasures from the Commonwealth, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1965; 6th International Print Biennial, Tokyo, 1968; 1st British International Drawing Biennial, Teesside Art Gallery, 1973 (where he was a Major Prize recipient); The Other Story, Hayward Gallery, London ; Printmakers of Pakistan, Bradford City Art Gallery and Museum, ; Typo, Ikon, Birmingham, ; Pakistan Another Vision, Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Brunei Gallery, London, 2000; and Migrations, Tate Britain, London, Selected solo shows include Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore, ; Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, Durham, 1963; Commonwealth Institute, Edinburgh, 1969; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1972; Indus Gallery, Karachi, 1985; PNCA Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, 1985; Manchester Metropolitan University, 1992; Birmingham City Museum, ; and Green Cardamom Gallery, London, 2009 and Shemza died in Stafford, UK, in Square Composition 10, 1963

8 Published by Jhaveri Contemporary on the occasion of Art Dubai, Krishna Niwas 58A Walkeshwar Road Mumbai info@jhavericontemporary.com 2014 Jhaveri Contemporary Text 2014 Amna Malik Images The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza