A Group of Standing Figures depicts elongated figures tightly grouped together, their angular heads referencing diacritic marks in Urdu script. Painted in July 1963, the same month as his exhibition at Henri Gallery in Washington DC, and shortly before his exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery in London in October–November that year. There is a painting listed in the London exhibition catalogue with the same title as this, so it may well have appeared in that exhibition, alongside seminal works such as The Last Supper, Judgement in Paris and The Three Graces.

This painting, along with Imagination, was exhibited and published in the catalogue for the 2003 exhibition Sadequain, The Holy Sinner, held at Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi. These two paintings were both previously in the collection of Abu Shamim Arif, an eminent Pakistani civil servant and patron of the arts, who was a close friend of Sadequain’s. He was one of the speakers at the first anniversary of the artist’s death in February 1988.