Important Notice

During the early years of her career, B Prabha experimented with a variety of genres and mediums before settling into a style and subject that remained her trademark throughout her career: a strikingly graceful portrayal of rural Indian women, slightly elongated in form, engaging in everyday tasks, as seen in the present lot, as well as lot 17 and 33. “Featured singly or in groups of two or three, [these women] were seen either against flat,... During the early years of her career, B Prabha experimented with a variety of genres and mediums before settling into a style and subject that remained her trademark throughout her career: a strikingly graceful portrayal of rural Indian women, slightly elongated in form, engaging in everyday tasks, as seen in the present lot, as well as lot 17 and 33. “Featured singly or in groups of two or three, [these women] were seen either against flat, undistinguished backgrounds or in their surroundings, the artist chronicling the lives of women from different rural and tribal communities with attentive details of their skin colour, traditional attire and jewellery but keener still to projecting an individual’s inner being or the dynamics between women. The seeming simplicity of the compositions belied the concern for women’s welfare and the need to document their unsung lives that drove the artist, herself practicing at a time when women had few opportunities.” (Kishore Singh ed., “B. Prabha: In A Wasted Landscape,” Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art II, New Delhi: DAG, 2017, p. 361)

Painted with a carefully modulated palette, Prabha’s work such as the present lot which depicts a group of fisherwomen in close interaction with one another, speaks volumes about the interiority of women’s lives. Beyond simple documentation, these works are odes to the spirit and struggles of women. Art writer Kishore Singh observes, “All of B. Prabha’s works are marked by a formal elegance of both compositional arrangement as well as palette and brushwork, achieving its height in her work featuring these women but, the same aesthetic and painterly approach is visible in her other works too” (Singh ed., p. 361).

Fisherwomen was acquired by the present owner’s father, A M Kadhiresan, who was the chairman of the Indian Overseas Bank in Chennai in 1964, and has been at their residence since.

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