 Ismail Gulgee - The Gulgeez (October 25, 1926 – December 16, 2007 ) Pride of Performance, Sitara-e-Imtiaz (twice), Hilal-e-Imtiaz, was an award-winning, globally famous Pakistani artist born in Peshawar. He was Ismaili Nizari Muslim (Aga Khani) by faith. He was a qualified engineer in the U.S.
and self-taught abstract painter and portrait painter.
Before 1959, as portraitist, he painted the entire Afghan Royal Family.
From about 1960 on, he was noted as an abstract painter influenced by
the tradition of Islamic calligraphy and by the American "action
painting" idiom.
 Art,
He began painting while training as an engineer in the USA (Columbia
and Harvard universities) and held his first exhibition in 1950. He
continued to paint while secretary at the Pakistan embassy at Ottawa
during the 1950s, developing a reputation for portraiture. In 1957 he
was commissioned to paint the portrait of King Zahir Shah of
Afghanistan, and in 1959 he held an exhibition of 151 paintings and
sketches in Kabul. He also painted portraits of Prince Karim Aga Khan
(1961), Zhou Enlai (1964), Queen Farah Diba of Iran (1965) and
President Ayub Khan of Pakistan (1968). He then turned to making
portraits from marble mosaic and semi-precious stones, a technique that
he had developed in Kabul in 1959. His abstract paintings, produced
since the 1960s, incorporate ornamental calligraphy, coloured beads,
small pieces of mirror, and gold and silver leaf. These works include a
large abstract mural painted in 1965 for the British engineering firm
Wates Ltd of London. In 1967 he began to make calligraphic sculptures
in bronze, based on verses of the Koran, which were first exhibited in
Tokyo in 1970. He made a large crescent and star in copper plate for
the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad in 1986, and produced calligraphy in
stone inside the mosque. |
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