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Bashir Mirza (Pakistani, 1941-2000)Lonely Girl
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Bashir Mirza (Pakistani, 1941-2000)
signed and dated '71 upper left
oil on canvas
91 x 91.5cm (35 13/16 x 36in).
Footnotes
Provenance
Private Pakistani Collection: acquired from the artist in 1975.
Private Pakistani Collection: acquired by the owner from the above in 2019.
Bashir Mirza spent the years 1969-70 in Germany, where he produced a number of erotic images of young women. In 1971 he returned to Pakistan and embarked on his Lonely Girl paintings, in which 'she was still dressed in German colours, but [he] draped her scantily in order not to outrage tender sensibilities' (Ijaz Ul Hassan, Painting in Pakistan, Lahore 1996, p. 99). Ul Hassan continues: 'The Lonely Girls with their lithe bodies, dreamy eyes and pouting mouths, "sensuous as an exotic perfume", are essentially reminiscences of the women the artist confides he has met or known'.
Bashir Mirza's work ran the gamut of styles throughout his career. After producing a good deal of abstract painting and symbolic reactions to the 1965 war with India, he began a completely figurative style after his return from Germany in 1971, epitomised in the Lonely Girls and Flower Flower series of the early to mid-seventies, which seem to capture a rather seventies hippyish mood. This stood in contrast to the largely non-figurative work being produced in Pakistan at that time (though as Akbar Naqvi notes, he had no difficulty in shifting backwards and forwards between these trends as the mood took him). Naqvi draws a parallel between the female heads which Mirza painted from 1977 to 1979 and the late paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil which looked towards Mughal miniatures; but more especially American Pop Art and billboards. Certainly the present work seems to resemble such imagery in its colour, starkness and almost enamel-like cleanness. (For discussion of Bashir Mirza, see Akbar Naqvi, Image and Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan, Oxford 1998, pp. 480-495).
Published
K. Said Butt, Paintings from Pakistan, 1982, p. 24
S.Amjad Ali, Painters of Pakistan, 1984, p.195
M. Husain, Bashir Mirza-Acrylic Series – Introduction by Victor Anant, 1995,
Harpers Bazar Arabia, Art/Culture, Summer 2020, p. 93
Saleroom notices
Please note that this work has appeared in the following publications: K. Said Butt, Paintings from Pakistan, 1982, p. 24 S.Amjad Ali, Painters of Pakistan, 1984, p.195 M. Husain, Bashir Mirza-Acrylic Series – Introduction by Victor Anant, 1995 Harpers Bazar Arabia, Art/Culture, Summer 2020, p. 93


