Anwar Jalal Shemza was born into a Kashmiri family in Shimla, then part of British India (now India), in 1928, graduating from the Mayo School of Art, Lahore in 1947. Having co-founded the modernist Lahore Art Circle in 1952, Shemza relocated to England in 1956, where, following his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, his art evolved to combine European modernist influences and Islamic architectural and calligraphic elements. Having briefly returned to Pakistan in the early 1960s, in 1962 Shemza settled in Stafford, England, where he taught and worked as an artist.
Painter, printmaker, writer and poet Anwar Jalal Shemza was born Anwar Jalal Butt into a Kashmiri family in Shimla, then part of British India (now India), on 14 July 1928. His grandfather owned a carpet business in Lahore and his father was a civil servant. Shemza was educated at missionary schools in Shimla, Ludhiana and Lahore. In 1943 he enrolled to study Persian, Arabic and Philosophy at the University of Punjab but switched to art the following year, and went on to study at the Mayo School of Art (currently the National College of Arts) in Lahore, obtaining a diploma in 1947. He subsequently opened the Shemza Commercial Art Studio in Lahore and adopted the name Anwar Jalal Shemza. During that time, Shemza also worked for the Government of Pakistan's Public Relations Department, designing propaganda pamphlets, cinema slides, press layouts and magazine illustrations, and for the Visual Aids Section of the Education Department, creating a series of posters that promoted adult education. From 1950–53 he was the editor of Ehsas, an Urdu fortnightly periodical dedicated to art and literature. He also actively engaged in literary activity, publishing a number of novels and poems in Urdu and achieving widespread recognition as a prominent member of the Lahore intelligentsia. In 1952 he co-founded the Lahore Art Circle, a group of young artists interested in modernism and abstraction, in contrast to the widespread social realist style, and participated in several solo and group exhibitions throughout Pakistan, exhibiting lyrical figurative works that drew inspiration from Mughal and Hindu themes. He was also appointed Head of the Art Department at Lawrence College, Public School for Boys, Ghora Gali and Cathedral High School, Lahore. Additionally, he produced scripts for various stations of Radio Pakistan in the form of art and architecture programming and productions for children.
In 1956, Shemza relocated to England to continue his education at the Slade School of Fine Art. However, his former artistic achievements were not recognised in the British context. As Shemza himself recalled, 'One evening when I was attending a Slade weekly lecture on the history of art, Prof. [Ernst] Gombrich came to the chapter on Islamic Art – art which was 'functional' – from his book The Story of Art. I remember leaving the room for a few minutes before the lecture finished and sitting on a bench outside. As the students came out, I looked at all their faces; they seemed so content and self-satisfied. I went home and looked again in the mirror. This time I couldn't find any familiar face at all, neither the beginner at Slade nor the 'celebrated artist'... All evening I destroyed paintings, drawings, everything that could be called art.' From this time onwards, a new direction emerged in Shemza's art. He was deeply influenced by the work of modernists including Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, combining the simplified formal language of these artists with motifs from Islamic architecture and calligraphy to create his own individual iconography.
In 1958, Shemza married the English artist Mary Katrina Taylor. Two years later, in 1960, he gained a diploma in fine art from University College, London; later the same year, he obtained a scholarship from the British Council to study etching and lithography with Anthony Gross at the Slade. Shortly afterwards, Shemza and his wife left for Pakistan, but his hope of obtaining a senior position at his former alma mater, renamed as the National College of Arts, did not materialise. Despite a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions, he was forced to work for an advertising firm in Karachi and dissatisfied, returned to England in 1962, settling in his wife's hometown of Stafford. While continuing his own practice in the evenings, he worked during the day as an art teacher, firstly, at Ounsdale High School from 1962–79, and, then, at Weston Road High School as Head of Art and Design from 1979–85. He exhibited his work in the UK from the late 1950s onwards, beginning with the acclaimed exhibition of the Pakistan Group London at London's Woodstock Gallery in 1958, with further shows at the New Vision Centre Gallery, London (1959), the Olde Soupe Kitchen, Stafford (1959), Gallery One, London (1960), the Oriental Art Museum, Durham (1963), the Commonwealth Institute, London (1966), the Arts Council galleries of Lahore (1967) and Karachi (1967), and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1972). He was also an internationally acclaimed printmaker, exhibiting at international print biennales. Anwar Jalal Shemza died in Stafford, England in January 1985. A posthumous exhibition of his Roots series toured Pakistan in the same year. Works by Anwar Jalal Shemza are in UK collections including Bradford Museums and Galleries, Birmingham Museums Trust and the Tate.
Since his death, Shemza's work has been included in a number of important exhibitions including, in 1989, The Other Story: Asian, African and Caribbean Artists in Post-War Britain, a major exhibition demonstrating an alternative to the mainstream Western artistic canon of modern art, curated by fellow Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen and held at the Hayward Gallery in London. The cover of the exhibition catalogue included a reproduction of Shemza's painting The Wall (1958). The first retrospective of his work was held at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in 1997–98. The Green Cardamom gallery in London organised two solo exhibitions of Shemza's work, Calligraphic Abstraction (2009) and The British Landscape (2010). In 2012, Shemza's works were included in the group exhibition Migrations: Journeys into British Art, at Tate Britain, which revisited the themes of the seminal 1989 Hayward Gallery show. A selection of Shemza's Square Compositions was displayed at Jahveri Contemporary gallery's solo stand at Art Dubai in 2014. Shemza's works were also included in Trajectories: 19th-21st Century Printmaking from India and Pakistan at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, UAE, in 2014. A solo BP Spotlight display opened at Tate Britain in October 2015, which included Shemza's paintings and prints from Tate's collection. Shemza's works were also featured in the seminal Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, in 2016–17. In 2019, Shemza's work was exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial 14 and the Manchester Art Gallery.