ISLAMABAD, 20 December 2007 — Pakistan’s prominent artist Ismail Gulgee was found murdered yesterday along with his wife and a maid in their Karachi home, police said. He was 81.
They said the three were found gagged in different rooms of the house, which is in the city’s most upmarket district. The hands of his wife, Zarina, were tied.
“All three were suffocated. This happened around three days ago,” said senior Karachi police officer Asif Ejaz Sheikh.
He said Gulgee’s body was found in the bedroom, his wife’s body in the kitchen and that of the maid in the main hall. The bodies were found by police after a neighbor complained of a bad smell.
Gulgee trained as an engineer in the United States before turning to painting works of modern art. He won various awards.
After starting out as a portrait painter, he turned to more abstract painting and became interested in Islamic calligraphy.
He produced numerous works using the different names of Allah, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said on its website (www.metmuseum.org).
“In these textural works, Gulgee brings the Islamic calligraphy tradition to the modern practice of action painting such as that developed by the American artist Jackson Pollock,” the museum said. President Pervez Musharraf said on his website Gulgee was his “all-time favorite” artist. Musharraf condemned the killings, state television reported.
Gulgee was born in Peshawar in 1926. He came to limelight in early 70s when his paintings made their way to the drawing rooms of Pakistan’s elite. He was responsible for decorating the minarets of Islamabad’s King Faisal Mosque.
Gulgee made portraits of late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, King Faisal, King Khaled and King Fahd. His son, Amin Gulgee, is a well-known sculptor.
