The London exposures of Ibrahim Hussein's stint at the Byam Shaw Academy (1959-1963) proved the most ebullient as he toyed around with the building blocks of abstractions, which gelled into more figurative flourishes in his stint in the United States in the latter half of the 1960s. Figure entanglements in planar geometric settings, with slanted panels and subdued pastel colours revealed restlessness and rumblings of commotion and even protests (Trafalgar Square). Ib, as the artist is popularly known, was still dabbling with brush and paint, before opting also for gouache and collage on 'canvas' of magazine paper in New York. In 1963, Ib had a solo at the John Whibley Gallery in London, and the next year, won the Griffin Prize. Of Ib's oeuvre, the London art critic Charles S. Spencer wrote: "The conscious over-laying of the linear definitions of the figures to such an extent that they become blurred into bulbous almost sculptural forms, gives the impression of not only movement but of power." Datuk Ibrahim Hussein is world-class, the most high profiled of Malaysian artists. He was given the global Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum (1997), was the first Malaysian to have taken part in the Venice Biennale (under the Smithsonian Institute Workshop, 1970), and he featured in a Best-of-the-World tripartite exhibition together with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali in Kuwait in 1977. His accolades include the Order of Andres Bello of Venezuela (1993), the Order of Bernardo Higgins (Chile's highest honour to a foreigner, 1996), the Japan Foundation Cultural Award (1988), and the XVIII Prix International D'Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo (1984). On the local front, he was accorded a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in 1986, awarded the Anugerah Tokoh Melayu Terbilang (2007) and had been conferred the Datuk title three times. He organised the first, and most successful, Langkawi International Festival of Arts, in 2000, after setting up his museum and foundation (2000) in Langkawi. With the help of his muse and wife Datin Sim, he organised the Club Mediterranee Asian Arts Festival in Cherating (Pahang) and Bali (Indonesia). Ib had his art tutelage at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and the Royal Academy in London (1963-1966). He also received a double scholarship of Fulbright and John D. Rockefeller II Fund that saw him in the United States, with two solos in New York to boot.