In the Memory of

Ismail Gulgee

[Gulgee Homepage] [Who Killed Gulgee] [Amin Gulgee] [Gulgee's Creativity] [Comments on Gulgee]

Eric Gibson, Executive Editor, Art News, New York

Gulgee's work is an example of the continuing dialogue between Eastern and Western artistic traditions. The artist is attempting to fuse two traditions, Islamic calligraphy, in which writing both carries a religious text and decorates a page, and the Western style of Abstract Expressionism, with its movemented brushstrokes.

These paintings combine the two traditions with grace and elegance, and at the same time manage to transcend them. The paintings stand as more than the sum of their source did.

Prof. Dr. Annemarie Schimmel, h.c. Mult. H.I., SQA.

Gulgee is no doubt the finest artist in Pakistan, able to capture the finest movement of soul and body in his drawings, highly inventive in his calligraphic paintings, and incredibly skilful in his compositions made of Lapis Lazuli.

Oleg Grabar, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., USA

The person is well known. Gulgee's passion is his art, his passion for making works of art shines through his formal portraits of world celebrities and almost overwhelms the subject…His oil paints are lavishly spread over his canvasses and give to all of them a striking vibrance a pungency of presence, which belongs to the most powerful effects associated with abstract expressionism.

Howard K. Walker, Ambassador (Retd.) of USA, 2000

I will never forget the day in 1988 when Gulgee gave me a personal tour of Islamabad's new great mosque where I wanted to see his magnificent sculptures on display. I had the sensation of being guided around the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. In the presence of his paintings, one has the multiple and complex impressions of sensual pleasures that emanate from incredible color and mysteriously energetic form, and of quiet, reflective, transcendental, spiritual wisdom.

James Gleeson, Art Critic & painter, Australia, 1965

Few artists today can match his ability to seize upon the essentials of a given situation, or of a character, and he works with an ardour and verse that commands our admiration.
 

[Gulgee Homepage] [Who Killed Gulgee] [Amin Gulgee] [Gulgee's Creativity] [Comments on Gulgee]