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Lot 38

 

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Jagdish Swaminathan’s art evokes a unique idiom developed from an assemblage of symbols. His formation of a distinct pictorial language system came from a belief that ideas on Indian modern art were centred on the hackneyed physical world. Challenging these ideas, he devoted himself to gaining a deep understanding of the semiotics of folk and tribal art. He began using geometric shapes and pure colours, which later came to represent simplified... Jagdish Swaminathan’s art evokes a unique idiom developed from an assemblage of symbols. His formation of a distinct pictorial language system came from a belief that ideas on Indian modern art were centred on the hackneyed physical world. Challenging these ideas, he devoted himself to gaining a deep understanding of the semiotics of folk and tribal art. He began using geometric shapes and pure colours, which later came to represent simplified versions of quotidian imagery.

In 1981, he set up the Roopanker Museum of art at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. As founder and director of the museum for nearly a decade, his appreciation of the folk and tribal arts of Central India intensified. Swaminathan “…was fascinated by the manner in which tribal perceptions created symbolic forms… Significantly, the paintings of the last phase of his life were concerned with the passage of a sign on its way to becoming a symbol. A symbol by its very nature is a means of communication sometimes of very complex ideas and it assumes a commonality of understanding between the maker and the receiver. In the case of Swami’s paintings the marks made with intentions and equally those which just happened to get there by virtue of the process, do not create symbols in the sense I have mentioned, but the completed painting is itself symbolic of the act of painting itself” (Krishen Khanna, J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, unpaginated).

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