Footnotes

• Provenance:
  European private collection.
  
  Sadequain spent time in the USA from May to August 1963, visiting New York and Washington, where he also exhibited. Resurrection can be seen as a continuation of a theme he began in Paris (where he first went in December 1960), in which he developed calligraphic interpretations of what Akbar Naqvi (Image and Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan, Oxford 1998, p. 373) calls 'the grotesqueries of the Gothic cathedrals', notably Notre-Dame, which he stared at while ill in bed. Naqvi (op. cit. p. 409) refers to this Paris influence as 'Calligraphic Cubism', and it is tempting to suggest that this concentration on architecture was continued (and once more inspired) by seeing the skyscrapers of New York City on this brief visit in 1963. This takes overt form in his New York by Night or Silhouette of a Group of Buildings, New York (illustrated in Abdul Hamid Akhund et al, Sadequain: The Holy Sinner, Mohatta Palace Museum 2002, no. 33), though in the present lot there remains more emphasis on the horizontal shapes in lighter colours, as seen in Boats (also from 1963, op. cit., no. 32). This potential influence is combined with the Paris background, and Resurrection can be compared with his work of 1962, Reflections on the Bank of the Seine (The Holy Sinner, nos. 38, 39 and 40), with a similar tower-like structure rising from the jagged lower register. In the present work, however, the whole composition seems to float on its dark background: the artist seems to be moving towards wholly calligraphic abstractions.

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Category: Islamic and Oriental Art / Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art

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