Four Figures Sitting in Paris
- Artist: Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi
- Date: 1967
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 2112 × 1503 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
"This is *Four Figures Sitting in Paris* by Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi, painted in 1967. The canvas is huge, its broad white lines sweeping across a muted grey‑purple field. Black contours cut out four abstract figures, each with a diamond‑shaped head and limbs that look like the flowing strokes of Urdu letters. It’s a visual shorthand for Sadequain’s calligraphic heritage.
Sadequain was both a poet and a painter, born into a family of calligraphers in what is now Pakistan. He moved to Paris in 1960, where he mingled with Négritude thinkers and exhibited alongside Lettrist artists. This work captures that period’s political energy—an abstract language that echoes anti‑colonial ideas and the wider postwar avant‑garde. The sweeping lines and semi‑abstract forms foreshadow the calligraphic murals he would later create back home.
So as you stand here, notice how the painting blends personal script with global currents—an early glimpse of the monumental calligraphic gestures that would define his legacy after 1967.
See it in person
Four Figures Sitting in Paris is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
