Important Notice

An accomplished draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne’s artistic vocabulary has both “…self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual... An accomplished draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne’s artistic vocabulary has both “…self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact. Of course, there is also an occluded playfulness that inhabits Pyne’s more apparent melancholia: his secrecy follows a method of allusion, but his references can be made to unknown or invented sources, giving his allegory an edge of unpredictability” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne”, Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Galerie 88, Mumbai, 2005, p. 16).

In the present lot, Pyne suspends a rib cage in mid air, calling it a ‘swing’ and delicately patterning it to bring out its inherent beauty. Drawing strongly on fantasy, Pyne converts this carcass into an object of beauty, a seat on which a delicate supernatural being may alight. Here, that being is a robed fairy with wings and a crown, gently swinging on her unnatural throne. The crown is a motif that Pyne often returns to, most often to bring forth the futility of power and responsibility. Here, however, Pyne uses it as a symbol of mythic significance, and, by adding a delicately exquisite flower next to the figure, heightens the beauty and playfulness of the composition. “Pyne is a master of patterning; in a sense, this is how he controls the emotional chaos and the heart-breaking melancholia of his subject matter. His paintings are assembled together by alternate stripes of light and shadow, by neat ensembles of ribs, arrangements of bones, strange shapes of shadow. These are relics of the macabre, reliquaries of absence and loss; but they are also markers of order” (Ibid., p. 14).

It was in the 1960s that Pyne began experimenting with tempera to refine his unique idiom and perfect his command over chiaroscuro, patterning and texturing of the painted surface. Reflecting on the artist’s choice of medium, Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Neither oil nor watercolour satisfied him: their range of effects was neither sumptuous enough on the one hand, nor ethereal enough on the other, to convey his particular atmospheres. He wished to work in a medium that was equally free of opacity and transparency. It was in the teaching and practice of Nandalal Bose, the Shilpacharya, as he was known, that Pyne found the medium that he was to adopt as his own: tempera, using fine medical gum as the binder for ground pigment. Tempera gave Pyne both crispness of line and a sense of depth, the necessary illusion of volume as well as a sense of idyllic lightness” (Ibid. p. 13).

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