47 Facts About Sadequain

Sadequain is considered one of the finest painters and calligraphers Pakistan has ever produced, having painted around 15000 paintings.

Sadequain is recognised as the only artist in Pakistan to have received all four civilian awards such as the Nishan-i-Imtiaz, Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, and Pride of Performance.

Sadequain was born on 30 June 1930 in Amroha, into a family of calligraphers.

Sadequain was widely praised for his calligraphy by many critics of South Asian art.

Sadequain was part of a broader Islamic art movement that emerged independently across North Africa and parts of Asia in the 1950s and known as the Hurufiyya movement.

Sadequain is a pioneer of the style, bringing calligraphy into a mainstream art form, and influencing subsequent generations of Pakistani artists.

Sadequain's murals depict man's endless quest to discover and develop the potentialities that lie within him.

Sadequain's murals are densely filled and tightly packed with images to render adequately the lofty subject.

Sadequain painted his earliest murals at Jinnah Hospital and PIA headquarters in the 1950s.

Sadequain painted the ceiling of the Lahore museum entrance hall, depicting the Evolution of Mankind, and additional nine large panels of calligraphies for the Islamic Gallery.

The bright colors Sadequain used in the mural to depict the Earth and the Heavens are fading away because of the environmental conditions.

The mural titled "Saga of Labor" by Sadequain at Mangla Dam is a glowing tribute to the working men and women of all times and places who form the backbone of any society.

Sadequain painted thousands of paintings, drawings, and murals in his lifetime.

Sadequain came from the small town of Amroha in Uttar Pradesh, India.

The collection titled Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequain Naqqash was an illustrated version with over two hundred drawings.

Best known for his calligraphies, Sadequain painted abstracts, drawings, and sketches on thousands of canvases, volumes of paper, and multitudes of other conventional and unconventional materials.

Sadequain was responsible for the renaissance of Islamic calligraphy in Pakistan.

Sadequain was one of the greatest calligraphers of Pakistan and helped transform the art of calligraphy into serious expressionist paintings.

Sadequain claimed that his transformation into a calligrapher was manifested by divine inspiration.

Sadequain did not follow the established tradition and created his own style of script.

Sadequain's alphabets exude motion, mood, and paint vivid pictures of the message of the words of Quran.

Sadequain claimed that many of his paintings, especially after the seventies, had been based on calligraphic forms to portray images of cities, buildings, forests, men, and women.

In Pakistan, the art of calligraphy was relegated to a second-class status until Sadequain adapted this medium in the late nineteen sixties.

Sadequain illustrated on canvas the poetry of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz as homage to their place in classical literature.

Sadequain wrote thousands of quartets, which address a common theme of social and cultural dogmas and published them.

Sadequain adapted this symbol to depict labour, struggle, and persistence against natural elements of resistance and triumph of hard work.

Sadequain sketched numerous drawings titled Cobweb Series, Crow Series, Christ Series, Hope Series, and Sun Series during the sixties, which were commentaries on prevailing social and cultural conditions.

Sadequain saw cobwebs engulfing our society rendering it speechless and motionless.

Contrary to man's images portrayed in Cobweb or Crow Series of drawings, Sadequain glorified the hard work and labour of ordinary workingmen by showing them struggling with primitive tools during the Stone Age, developing agricultural land, discovering scientific breakthroughs, and exploring the universe.

Sadequain sometimes used Kufic script to form human images and carried that theme through vast canvases.

Sadequain was awarded first prize in National Exhibition of Pakistan in the early sixties.

Sadequain was bestowed with several awards and medals in Pakistan as well as foreign countries.

Sadequain wrote thousands of "Rubaiyats," which he published in several books.

Sadequain declared the giveaways as gifts to the citizens of the cities where the public buildings were situated.

Sadequain has been covered in the print and electronic media extensively such as the TV series "Mojeeza-e-Fun" which highlighted his work in a masterful documentary.

The massive book is one of the largest and heaviest ever published in Pakistan and it has a collection of articles about Sadequain published previously in magazines and papers over the course of years.

The mammoth book "The Holy Sinner: Sadequain", is a tribute and celebration of this Pakistani artist's vitality, innovation, restless fervor and immense amount of energy.

The book is primarily based on the famous exhibition of paintings of Sadequain titled, The Holy Sinner: Sadequain which ended about a year ago and was by far the largest-attended and longest-running exhibition in the history of Pakistani art.

Sadequain was an untraditional and self-made, self-taught painter and calligrapher who created a mysterious and mystic environment with his bold and uninhibited use of media and lines had a cult-like following in his own lifetime.

The Holy Sinner: Sadequain contains over 400 of his series of drawings, paintings, and murals, each representing a different phase of his career and depicting his unique strokes, style, and color schemes.

The exhibition was a rare opportunity for the viewers because Sadequain, who became a virtual household word for his calligraphic works did not exhibit his abstract paintings during the last days of his life and of course the large number of murals that he painted were dedicated to specific locations only.

The book, The Holy Sinner: Sadequain, includes drawings series titled, Cacti series, the Sun series, Exposition series, Cobweb series, etc.

The paintings in The Holy Sinner: Sadequain, represent various themes such as man's struggle against natural odds, mother and child, still life figures from the early life of the artist and many others.

The centerpiece of the book is its treatment of the famous mural by Sadequain commissioned for the State Bank of Pakistan.

PIA owned Mid Way House hotel had a big Sadequain's painting at entrance and lot of other artwork by renowned Pakistani artists.

In 2015, Sadequain's 'Qalandar' was sold for $173,000 at Christie's.

Sadequain died on 10 February 1987 at Karachi, Pakistan at the age of 56.