Ismail Gulgee was a Pakistani painter and sculptor. He began painting while training as an engineer at the Columbia and Harvard universities in the USA, and held his first exhibition in 1950.
He continued to paint while he was a secretary at the Pakistan Embassy in Ottawa during the 1950s, developing a reputation for portraiture.
In 1957, he was commissioned to paint the portrait of King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan; and in 1959, he held an exhibition of 151 paintings and sketches in Kabul.
He also painted portraits of Prince Karim Aga Khan (1961), Zhou Enlai (1964), Queen Farah Diba (1965) and President Ayub Khan (1968).
He then turned to making portraits from marble mosaic and semi-precious stones, a technique that he had developed in Kabul in 1959.
His abstract paintings, produced since the 1960s, incorporate ornamental calligraphy, coloured beads, small pieces of mirror, and gold and silver leaves. These works include a large abstract mural painted in 1965 for a British engineering firm.
In 1967, he began to make calligraphic sculptures in bronze, based on the verses of the Quran, which were first exhibited in Tokyo in 1970.
He made a large crescent and star in copper plate for the Faisal mosque in Islamabad in 1986, and produced calligraphy in stone inside the mosque.
Gulgee was awarded the Pride of Performance and the Hilal-e-Imtiaz. He was also conferred the Sitara-e-Imtiaz twice.
Photos courtesy VASL Art
