The Wall by Anwar Jalal Shemza

‘Shemza was one of my art teachers at school in my teens. An elegant, friendly, encouraging man, it wasn’t until years later that I realised the significance of who he was, when, as a recent graduate from art school, I saw this is a modest yet intense painting. Commanding a sense of space far beyond its scale, it is elaborately constructed from simplified forms inspired by Islamic art, architecture and early literary influences, particularly calligraphy, combined with Western abstraction. The surface is structured by a geometry and pattern created with his characteristic use of repeated circular and square forms. For me, it embodies a distillation of the formative effect he and others were to have on my future development and interests’