Asia House Studio

In Pakistan, Jamil Naqsh is probably best known for his paintings featuring pigeons, or pigeons with beautiful women. These refer to a very particular aspect of his own past, as well as to specific aspects of Pakistani culture. When Naqsh was forced to leave Kairana, in Uttar Pradesh, where he was born, amid the violent turmoil of Partition, he was in his teens. After the turmoil subsided, he returned, to find that a familiar domestic world, which had seemed completely stable, to all intents and purposes immutable, had vanished.

Following World War II, the new generation of artists in Pakistan, to which Naqsh then belonged, was thrust into a new aesthetic world by the colour illustrated art magazines and books that were then becoming widely available internationally. Essentially this meant that the achievements of the European and American Modern Movements hit them all at once, rather than arriving in historical sequence. Picasso was not a remote, venerated elder. He was someone with whom they could imagine having a conversation - a conversation on equal terms

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