Thank you for registering for our auction! You are required to provide: 1. Deposit; 保证金待商议; 2. Copy or images of ID card (front and back) or Passport 3. Images of Credit card (front and back).
SADEQUAIN (1930-1987) Untitled (Arabesque) signed 'SADEQUAIN' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 47 ? x 70 in. (120 x 177.8 cm.) Painted circa mid-1960s
"[Sadequain] intuitively declined the miniature, firstly because his talents demanded much bigger dimensions of space, much bigger brushes and knives and tubes of pigments, and secondly because it was impossible for him to arrest his growth and reduce himself to a mere illustrator. He wanted to create" (Y. Said, quoted in I. Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, 2010, p. 155).
Sadequain is considered one of South Asia's most important modern artists, and his public works adorn many of Pakistan's institutions and historic buildings such as Frere Hall in Karachi, the State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi, and the Lahore Museum. Sadequain came from a family of calligraphers which greatly influenced his style. While much of his work is broadly figurative, the formal qualities of calligraphy, so integral to visual and literary culture in Pakistan, dominated his aesthetic oeuvre. Whether as literal text in his paintings and drawings through quatrains of poetry, or as a compositional tool for his abstracted figures, calligraphy is at the heart of Sadequain’s practice.
A romantic bohemian, Sadequain was drawn to Paris, where he lived from 1960 to 1967, following an invitation to visit from the French Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts. His work was greeted warmly in Europe, winning him quick success including the laureate award and scholarship in the category 'Artists under 35' at the second Biennale de Paris in 1961, which allowed him to remain in the city. Reviewing the artist's work, Raymond Cogniat, who founded the Biennale, noted, "His grand compositions in black and white demonstrate what close links exist between this art and its traditional sources, notably calligraphy, whose influence the artist himself recognises. The abstract art thus takes on the value of a mysterious language. On this secret significance of the manuscript, Sadequain adds up the impression of space, density, volume and the reality of matter, which transforms an abstract thought into a material fact in plastic" (R. Cogniat, Le Figaro, 16 October 1962).
Untitled (Arabesque) was painted in Paris during the mid-1960s, when Sadequain had fully embraced the flowing forms of calligraphy and was working on a series of compositions populated by dynamic, interwoven forms that seemed to have a life of their own. While many of his contemporaries in Pakistan expounded the miniature format in the scale of their work, Sadequain's diverse body of work often embraced the monumentality of the mural format. He believed that space was required to allow his creativity free reign and his work to grow organically and exponentially. Examples of this series of paintings from the 1960s that have come to auction in recent years have been on a modest scale. However, in the present large-format example, Sadequain masterfully adapts the intimacy of calligraphy to the scale of the mural. Painted at the end of Sadequain’s successful stint in Paris, this exemplar of calligraphic abstraction represents the very essence of the practice of Pakistan’s most celebrated modern painter.