For this week's Friday Find we are celebrating the work of painter Ahmed Parvez, and commemorating the life of Wahab Jaffer who sadly died earlier this week.
Wahab was a wonderful individual. A collector, painter and great friend and patron to many artists. I first met him 15 or so years ago in the line of duty, and it was always a great pleasure to see him.
He was a repository of fantastic stories. He once told me about a Sabavala he bought on Portobello market in the 1980s, for around £3,000 - those were the days. He hung it in his kitchen, and a friend would come round to his house and badger him to sell it. Reluctantly, after several visits he did, for around £8,000. That work was later sold at Bonhams. Given the strength of the market for this artist, that price looks like a bargain as well. Oh, the benefit of hindsight…
- Charles Moore
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Wahab also kept the most wonderful archives, which are available to view on the Asia Art Archive website. If you have a few days spare, it's worth getting lost in these fantastic documents. They are an account of the arts ecosystem in Karachi from the 1970s to mid-2000s, and document his relationships with artists, galleries and collectors, with artist's scrap books, letters and photographs.
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Parvez was a complex and flawed character, but a talented and prolific artist. He moved to Britain in 1955, that year participating in the 3rd São Paulo Bienal. Times were tough in London, and he worked hard to establish his career, eventually attracting acclaim as a significant abstract painter, often mentioned in the same sentence as Allan Davie.
Whilst in London he co-founded the 'Pakistan Group', along with Anwar Jalal Shemza, Safiudin Ahmed, Murtaza Bashir and Ali Imam. He showed several times with Denis Bowen's New Vision Centre Gallery, with whom he found success. In 1963 he had a large retrospective at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery. The scruffily annotated sales book from that show is an insight into his mind I feel… -
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. . . . We do not reject the 'forever' glorious past. Modern art is not without traces of continuity with the methods of past. In fact, we the progressive artists are more often going backwards to the primeval and the elementry; from the informal to the formal; from figure to image; from image to symbol and from thence to memory and from memory to the unconscious . . . .
Parvez in a letter to Nora Gibbs, London, 1962
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Parvez was also included in Rasheed Araeen's The Other Story, at the Hayward Gallery in 1989 as part of the section titled In the Citadel of Modernism:
This broad section, which includes both figurative and abstract artists, represents the first generation of artists. While they adopt the vocabularies and methodologies of established Modernism, they have been able to create something extraordinarily new. These artists do not generally question or directly challenge the formal framework of modernist developments, but within it they have developed their own perceptions and critical positions which are often to do with not being Western/white artists. Realising that the country they had adopted was not sympathetic to their modern aspirations and ambitions, they incorporated the values and sensibilities of their own cultures in their work.
Their achievements reflect a problematic relationship with Modernism, often creating paradoxes which signify both the complex cross-cultural situations of these artists and the difficulties they experienced within the framework of the dominant culture.
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On the subject of books, I am compiling a monograph on the work of Parvez and am looking for images of works in public and private collections. If anyone is aware of work that the owners would like included please do get in touch.
A recent call out in the Antiques Trade Gazette yielded an amazing response. The wife of Nicholas Spurrier, owner of Lincoln Gallery in London in the 1950s contact us, and we subsequently acquired several works from her collection as well as some wonderful archive material. Definitely one for a future Friday Find...
To discuss anything in particular, please contact the gallery.
