Important Notice

"Each line drawn, each form shaped, tone, colour, the tension, space, proportion, their interrelation, has its reason to be, its proper logic, a logical existence, sequence, and consequence"-Akbar Padamsee to Jacques Riols of The Sunday Statement in July, 1953.

Padamsee's words to Riols collate his artistic progression as a logical sequence of experiments that helped him discover his style. In a 1952 show of his works, an art critic... "Each line drawn, each form shaped, tone, colour, the tension, space, proportion, their interrelation, has its reason to be, its proper logic, a logical existence, sequence, and consequence"-Akbar Padamsee to Jacques Riols of The Sunday Statement in July, 1953.

Padamsee's words to Riols collate his artistic progression as a logical sequence of experiments that helped him discover his style. In a 1952 show of his works, an art critic for Marg (Vol. VI, No. I) observed how the artist showed exciting experimental qualities, infusing his work with mystery and power. From his early figurative works from the 1950s, Padamsee's experimentation led him to shift to his landscapes five years later, which continued through the 1960s. His influences trace back to his time at the Sir J. J. School of Arts in the late 1940s, where he read extensively about the Upanishads and Hindu iconography in the Shilpashastra, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Max Mueller, Adi Shankaracharya; about the ancient civilisations of Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and studied the various styles of art in depth. His subsequent travels across India and France sowed the seeds for his development as an artist. He experimented with colour, turning to rich, saturated tones later in the 1960s, and this sustained experimentation with landscapes resulted in the metascape series of the 1970s. Its genesis, of which the present lot is a part, is the landscape series that featured an ochre sun at the top of the painting.

What distinguishes his metascape series from the rest of his works is the introduction of the sun and the moon in the same canvas, stripping these works of any specific allusion to time or location. Between 1967-70, Beth Citron observes how Padamsee's teaching practices at the Art Department of Stout State University in Wisconsin demonstrated his sensitivity to the "total synthesis of his environment, visually and through sensation" ("Akbar Padamsee's Artistic "Landscape" of the '60s", Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, ed. Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella, Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, pg. 211). While referring to the metascapes, Padamsee mentions Kalidasa's play Abhijanashakuntalam, in which he narrates the cohabitation of the sun and moon. Commenting on the inception of this series in an interview with Homi Bhabha, he said: "In the introductory stanza…[Kalidasa] describes the sun and the moon as the two controllers of time…and water and a source of all seeds….I would never have thought of painting the sun and the moon together if it were not for this. I felt I could use the elements - water, earth, sky - without referring to any particular landscape - a metaphysical landscape" ("Figure and Shadow: Conversations on the Illusive Art of Akbar Padamsee", Ibid., pgs. 29, 33).

In the same interview, Padamsee revealed that he would spend four to five hours working on the metascapes each day, and would often deviate from what he had initially planned for them. Homi Bhabha notes that these metascapes possess a "huge formal value taken on by the painted surfaces, which move glacially towards a horizon. The paint doesn't appear to be a skin on a surface…[it] is developing the actual structure of the metascape" (Ibid.).

The present work demonstrates his mastery over colour and its interplay with form and space. The sun and the moon-first making an appearance together in 1975-appear to be mirroring each other. Padamsee refers to this as bimba-pratibimba: not a reflection of an image, but rather a "turning away from that image". The latitudinal division of the canvas suggests this, and colour serves to "direct the movement of the eyes", as noted by Veena Das (Ibid., pg 259).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site