A retrospective exhibition dedicated to the paintings of controversial Pakistani artist, Tasaduq Sohail, will open at The Noble Sage in Londonon the 20th June. Sohail fled his homeland in 1961 to start a new life in the UK. Though far away, the oppression and violence that he encountered as a young man after partition never left him. The paintings in this exhibition, all executed in London, respond to his past with a biting, satirical wit as much as with a strange, macabre vision of the world.

Rebellious and prolific, Tasaduq Sohail is today certainly one of the most renowned contemporary artists of Pakistan. At 77 years old, he has had over 40 solo exhibitions to date, more than 25 in Pakistan and 15 internationally. A month back, a painting sold for well above double the starting estimate at a Bonhams auction. Sohail is finally enjoying the success he deserves after more than forty years of toil to break the London art scene.

Born in Jullundhar, East Punjab, in 1930, Sohail describes his early days as fraught with despair, violence and repression. With partition taking effect in 1947, his home region was soon in bloody turmoil with many different groups vying for domination. Sohail remembers his family fleeing Jullundhar: 'They nearly killed me in Amritsar… we could see them sharpening their knives. They were going to kill the whole train.' It was only incidental luck that his family escaped with their life.

It is in these early years that a hatred began to take shape of those systematic forces that suppressed humanity's natural longings. The mullahs walking amongst his people, preaching God and their 'correct' way of life, became archetypes of oppression and abuse, the great hypocrites guiding violence and destruction from behind-the-scenes. Whether it was priests, rabbis, or mullahs, to Sohail they were all living a lie and, worst of all, forcing others to live the same way. By 1961, the claustrophobia became too much and the artist left Karachi for England. For many years he lived a lowly, often penniless existence in North London. He had forty-five jobs in five years: a bus conductor, a toilet cleaner and a supermarket shelf-filler to name just a few.

The ever-cheeky Sohail loves to remind us of his beginnings in art. One day, surrounded by young women on a bus journey, the artist found that they were all going to a nude figure drawing class at Central St. Martin's Art College. As the artist happily states, the strip joints were leaving him utterly broke and so 'this was cheaper'. Whilst drawing, Sohail remembers thinking they were going to kick him out. Instead, the teacher saw genius in his attempt and encouraged him further. It was an unlikely start to a successful artistic career.

Most startling in exhibition are the macabre drawings created in McDonalds. These small, spidery pen and ink works describe the underside of the buoyant life he saw around him. Through the veil of his own anxieties and the violent experiences of his youth, Sohail combines natural landscapes with charnel house-like goriness: smiling skulls and bloody carcasses intermingle with rocky vegetation. Below Sohail signs his name, the date and lastly his blood pressure - as if the very act of creation had an effect on his heart rate.

Often in his watercolours, mullahs or miscellaneous priests are caught with their pants down in compromising situations. Their hypocrisy is the target for Sohail, their sordid dream/real life activities a point of indignation and satirical ridicule. Animals likewise feature highly in Sohail's art. Drawing on Persian poetry, animals here possess the faculty of the human mind and are the carriers of advice for man. Untouched by man's degradation, Sohail's animals become the standard-bearers of natural order, the proof of another idyllic way of living.

A wry sense of humour is evident in much of Sohail's work. His world is so dehumanised and immoral that laughter has become a necessity just to bear its tragedy and abhorrent nature. Men are disgusting puppets that he loves to hate so much as to wish them off the face of the earth. Balanced with his dark wit, is an almost naïve idealisation of the world in his canvas painting. When landscapes are made 'pretty' by Sohail, it is often to the point of disbelief. Animals frolic and trees flourish under a strange unnatural sunlight. As the artist himself admits, he sugar-coats bitter truths in many of his pictures. What lies beneath the fantastical, we presume is only, again, death and decay.

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