Ismail Gulgee
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Ismail Gulgee is an award-winning, globally famous Pakistani artist born in Peshawar on October 25, 1926. He is a qualified engineer in the USA and self-taught abstract painter and portrait painter. Before 1959, as portraitist, he painted the entire Afghan Royal Family. From about 1960 on, he is noted as an abstract painter influenced by the tradition of Islamic calligraphy and by the American "action painting" idiom.
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[edit] Engineer, portraitist, Islamic calligrapher, and action painter
According to artnet.com, Gulgee started to paint while acquiring his training as an engineer in the United States at Columbia University and then Harvard. His first exhibition was in 1950.
Gulgee is a gifted and consummately skilled naturalistic portrait painter who has enjoyed (according to Partha Mitter) "lavish state support" and plenty of elite commissions in this capacity. Nevertheless, he is perhaps best known worldwide for his abstract work, which is inspired by Islamic calligraphy and is also influenced by the "action painting" movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Mitter notes that Elaine Hamilton was a strong influence in this direction). This is perhaps a natural enough stylistic combination, since in both Islamic calligraphy and action painting a high value is placed on the unity and energy of gestural flow. As with the works of other action painters or abstract expressionists, Gulgee's canvases are often quite large. He is also known for using materials such as mirror glass and gold or silver leaf in his oil paintings, so that they are in fact mixed media pieces.
According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see external links): "Gulgee's calligraphy paintings are abstract and gestural interpretations of Arabic and Urdu letters. His sweeping layers of paint explore the formal qualities of oil paint while they make references to Islamic design elements." [1]
Gulgee has since the 1960s also created sculptures, including bronze pieces that are (like so many of his paintings) calligraphic in form and inspiration, and sometimes specifically based on verses from the Koran [source:artnet.com].
His paintings are bright and full of color, but the paint is put on with great sensitivity, and paintings vibrate with intense feeling. Areas sing with luminous, thin color; thick blobs of paint pulsate with fiberglass tears, the brush swirls strong and free. The total effect is very free, yet considered and well thought out. They work enormously well, because it is all orchestrated with great care and concentration.
Paintings are often commissioned, or go abroad and therefore only reach relatively small audience. He has had exhibitions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
His son Amin Gulgee is also a famous artist.
[Note: the name is spelled "Guljee" in some sources.]
[edit] See also
- Islamic calligraphy (primary source of inspiration for Gulgee's abstract works)
- Action painting (Gestural abstraction)
- Elaine Hamilton (American action painter and colleague who influenced Gulgee, according to Partha Mitter)
- Mixed media
- Abstract expressionism
[edit] References
- Ismaili, Mohammad. Gulgee (Lahore : Ferozsons, 2000) ISBN 9690014285
- Mitter, Partha. Indian art (Oxford History of Art) (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001) ISBN 0192842218 (This book deals with the history of art in the entire South Asian subcontinent, including what are today modern Pakistan and Bangladesh.)
- Naqvi, Akbar. Image and Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan. (Karachi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[edit] External links
- Art Review [2]
- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York): discussion of modern art in Pakistan (including COLOR IMAGE of a 1999 Gulgee work)
- Royaat Gallery (Lahore, Pakistan): includes COLOR IMAGE of Gulgee work.
- Artnet Resource Library biography of Gulgee
