Sadequain

Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi (30 June 1930 10 February 1987), and often referred to as Sadequain Naqqash, was a historical Pakistani artist and poet best known for his skills as a calligrapher and a painter.

He is considered one of the finest painters and calligraphers Pakistan has ever produced, having painted around 15000 paintings.

He is also recognised as the only artist in Pakistan to have received all four civilian awards such as the Nishan-i-Imtiaz, Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, and Pride of Performance.

He was also a poet, writing hundreds of rubāʿiyāt in the style of Omar Khayyam and Sarmad Kashani.

Sadequain was born on 30 June 1930 in Amroha, into a family of calligraphers.

In late 1940s he joined the Progressive Writers' and Artists Movement.

His true talent was discovered by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy who brought Sadequain into the limelight.

He also spent some time in Paris augmenting his skills.

Sadequain was widely praised for his calligraphic style, which is considered iconic by many critics of South Asian art.

He, along with his family members, had migrated to Pakistan during the 1947 partition, residing in the Nazimabad neighbourhood of Karachi.

Sadequain was the most prolific painter in the period following the independence of Pakistan in 1947.

He was constantly at work and he worked on a large scale.

He repeatedly stated that he was not interested in decorating drawing rooms of the rich and powerful.

He worked on large murals for public buildings, symbolic of the collective labour of humanity, and his work was mostly donated to the public.

Sadequain in his own words was primarily a painter of figures with allegorical significance.

Sadequain was a social commentator.

His murals depict man's endless quest to discover and develop the potentialities that lie within him.

His murals are densely filled and tightly packed with images to render adequately the lofty subject.

As a master muralist some of his works adorn the halls of:

His monumental murals, in excess of thirty-five, adorn the halls of State Bank, Frere Hall Karachi; Lahore Museum; Punjab University; Mangla Dam; Aligarh Muslim University; Banaras Hindu University; Indian Institute of Geological Sciences; Islamic Institute in Delhi, and Abu Dhabi Power House, among others.

His paintings and calligraphies in the building of the Islamic Institute in Delhi alone cover more than seven thousand square feet.

Sadequain was part of a broader Islamic art movement that emerged independently across North Africa and parts of Asia in the 1950s and known as the Hurufiyya movement.

Hurufiyah refers to the attempt by artists to combine traditional art forms, notably calligraphy as a graphic element within a contemporary artwork.

Hurufiyah artists rejected Western art concepts, and instead searched for a new visual languages that reflected their own culture and heritage.

These artists successfully transformed calligraphy into a modern aesthetic, which was both contemporary and indigenous.

Prior to Sadeqain's work, only a few painters had experimented with the medium in Pakistan.

Sadequain is a pioneer of the style, bringing calligraphy into a mainstream art form, and influencing subsequent generations of Pakistani artists.

Salahi carried the script with a flourish in all directions, giving it the 'power of space, vigor and volume'.

Sadequain painted classical literature from the poetic verses of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz.

He belonged to the school of thought which enriched realism with lyricism.

His work was essentially linear.

He also illustrated French Nobel Prize–winning writer Albert Camus.

Thousand of the drawings he executed, were given away to his admirers.

He wrote and published hundreds of quartets.

Sadequain painted his earliest murals at Jinnah Hospital and PIA headquarters in the 1950s.

These murals have disappeared and their fate is unknown.

In 1961 he painted a huge mural (62'X10') in the Head Office of the State Bank of Pakistan in Karachi, titled "Treasures of Time," in which he showed the intellectual advance of man from the times of Socrates to that of Iqbal and Einstein.

It is a linear creation that shows a pageant of intellectuals and thinkers of the Greek era, mathematicians and chemists of the Middle East, scholars of the European Renaissance, and 20th-century laureates.

This large mural has endured transportation from the State Bank to Mohatta Palace (for the exhibition The Holy Sinner), and back to State Bank and has deep scars to prove the ordeal.

Sadequain painted the ceiling of the Lahore museum entrance hall, depicting the Evolution of Mankind, and additional nine large panels of calligraphies for the Islamic Gallery.