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Lot 66

 

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"Colour is wave-length. It has greater or lesser frequency, faster or slower speed. Certain colours, for instance, red, reach the eye before blue. This creates dimension. Colour orchestration becomes sculpture... Colour breaks the speed of looking." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

In the late 1950s and 60s, Padamsee travelled within India and Europe, and encountered diverse geographies. During this time, he began to delve into landscape... "Colour is wave-length. It has greater or lesser frequency, faster or slower speed. Certain colours, for instance, red, reach the eye before blue. This creates dimension. Colour orchestration becomes sculpture... Colour breaks the speed of looking." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

In the late 1950s and 60s, Padamsee travelled within India and Europe, and encountered diverse geographies. During this time, he began to delve into landscape painting, especially "imaginative, natural landscapes" which "transcended the representation of specific sites and physically accurate settings... impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition." (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic "Landscape" of the '60s," Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)

The present lot was painted in the year following Padamsee's immensely successful exhibition of 'Grey' works at Gallery 59 in then Bombay. Here, the artist explores a wider palette, and the colours are deep and earthy. The brushstrokes evoke an almost sculptural texture and terrain. As the title suggests, the artist's landscapes of the 1960s were a significant precursor to his 'Metascapes' of the next decade, which evolved from the sustained experimentation during this period. In addition to tracing the progression of Padamsee's oeuvre, "...contextualizing Padamsee's unearthing of the landscape concept is critical to the mapping of a broader art history because of the relative uncommonness of non-peopled, non-urban landscapes in traditional and modern Indian art history." (Citron, p. 196)

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