Artist: Jamil Naqsh

Grosvenor Gallery presents an exhibition of significant early paintings by the Pakistani artist Jamil Naqsh (1939-2019), one of the foremost painters of his generation.

Naqsh was born into an affluent Muslim family in 1939 in Kairana, on the banks of the River Jumna in India, and moved to Karachi following Partition. A period of intense poverty and neglect ensued for Naqsh, and it was through sheer persistence that in 1956 he secured a place at the Mayo School of Arts (now the National College of Arts, Lahore) to study miniature painting under Hajji Sharif, a renowned traditional miniature painter.

After leaving the Mayo School, Naqsh came to Karachi and worked as a truck painter by day, painting on newspaper at night and sleeping on the streets in front of the courthouse. Naqsh eventually joined the Lintas advertising agency, where he worked for a decade as a designer and illustrator. He was also co-editor of the Urdu literary magazine Seep, for which his work regularly appeared on the cover.

He had his first solo exhibition at the Arts Council, Lahore, in 1961, with shows in Karachi following soon after. In the 1970s, Shakir Ali would celebrate Naqsh as a generational talent.

Naqsh is best known for his figurative oil paintings of women with pigeons. The textured surfaces of his paintings, often rendered in muted palettes of grey, blue, and yellow, are carefully composed and demonstrate exceptional draftsmanship. During the 1960s and '70s, Naqsh explored naturalistic painting before gradually combining naturalism with abstraction, creating stylised female nudes set against empty, heavily textured backgrounds.

This technique reached its fullest expression in the 1970s and 1980s, when his canvases were constructed from countless tiny daubs of paint, recalling the meticulousness of miniature painting and producing a chromatic effect akin to a mosaic or fractured, dazzling light. It is this pivotal period in Naqsh's career that our exhibition focuses on, and includes several important paintings from private British collections.