Pakistan

The All-Triumphant Power of Reason

By Sadequen. Pakistan. 1970s

Oil on canvas.

184.5 × 118.5 cm. Inv. No. 25724 КП

Received in 1975 from the USSR Ministry of Culture, Moscow. First publication.

Sadequen is one of the leading figures in contem­porary Pakistani art. He lives and works in Lahore. His first one-man show took place in 1955, and in 1961, he was awarded the first prize at the National Art Exhibition. Since then Sadequen's pictures have received many national and international awards. In 1975, the first exhibition of his works was held in the Soviet Union, at the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow.

Having received his education at home and having then gone through the effects of various Western influences, Sadequen began to look for his own style and artistic idiom. The mature Sadequen is a versatile artist who works in fresco and oil painting and graphic art. He also produces calligraphic compositions on paper and vellum and illustrates his own poems.

Sadequen's experimenting and search for new expressive means have gone on. The artist perceives the world in his own way and gives it a philosophic interpretation of his own. His pictures are often fraught with complicated symbolic imagery. The main theme of the artist is the fight of light and darkness, of reason and ignorance, of the progressive and reactionary. His characters are either fighters who triumph over the forces of reaction, or victims who lose this fight and suffer under the burden of their failure.

Sadequen's oil paintings are characterized by their clarity of line and subdued colouring.