by RAJESH PUNJ
Sadequain was born in Amroha (in the north-west of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) during the height of the British rule in 1930. It was the colonial context that helped him combine his calligraphy skills with an interest in the ideas propounded by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (1947-1956) that included the likes of M F Husain, F N Souza, and S H Raza. It was also the British presence in India that introduced Sadequain to European modernism as an alternative aesthetic movement to the purely Indian nationalist artistic aesthetics prevalent at the time. The freedom that both the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and modernism bestowed upon him led the young bespectacled Sadequain to make creative choices based on artistic tenets he knew intuitively rather than through formal study.
Sadequain is renowned for a number of murals that adorn public spaces in Pakistan which he created between 1955 and 1986. Inspired by humanist and progressive ideas, he interwove icons and images in these murals in such a way that they highlight the complex state of life that human beings face on earth — with all its actions and ideas, wants and desires, successes and failures and ecstasies and agonies. His murals are as visually eloquent about the life of ordinary people as those created by Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
Script for Sadequain was as favoured a format as figural representation or abstraction. He masterfully used his skill at calligraphy to turn it into a medium for public art. Claiming that his calligraphy works resulted from divine inspiration, he was of the view that these were more the property of the people than belonging to a privileged few who could afford to purchase them.
Sadequain briefly migrated from Pakistan to Paris, for six years, after he was given the Laureate de Paris award in 1961. During those years, he took a break from his signature style art work – large scale murals and calligraphy – and instead illustrated a series of publications including The Stranger, a literary masterpiece written by Albert Camus in 1942. He produced a set of colour and black-and-white lithographs that accompanied a special edition of the novel. The exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery has showcased illustrations out of this set.
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