Important Notice

Over the course of the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan's work underwent a dramatic shift in technique, style and subject. As Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, Swaminathan gained a deep understanding of the symbolic basis of several forms of tribal Indian art, some of which he had initially explored in the 1960s. In an effort to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors, the artist adopted much of this ancient... Over the course of the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan's work underwent a dramatic shift in technique, style and subject. As Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, Swaminathan gained a deep understanding of the symbolic basis of several forms of tribal Indian art, some of which he had initially explored in the 1960s. In an effort to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors, the artist adopted much of this ancient symbology in his own work. Abandoning the pristine depictions of nature in his Bird, Mountain and Tree series, the artist shifted his focus towards a more primitive communication of the unrealized universe through tantric forms and tribal signs.

"Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings" (Jagdish Swaminathan, "The Cygan: An Auto-bio note", Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, March 1995, p. 13).

The present lots differs from his initial experiments with tribal art in that it is not concerned with the known connotations of signs, but with an entirely new representational language. Here, the emphasis "…is on primal Indian symbols and their contemporary relevance, on indigenous abstraction, and the free surface treatment of the canvas." In these canvases, textured to look like decorated walls, Swaminathan uses combinations of "…pre-iconographic symbols like the lotus, the sun, the square and triangle, the lingam, the swastika" to imbue each painting with multiple layers of meaning (Gayatri Sinha, India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Jane Voorhess Zimmerli Art Museum exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 117).

Simultaneously experimenting with technique, Swaminathan used natural pigments bound to the surface with a wax based medium in this series. Emulating tribal wall paintings, the artist employed his own fingers and rubber rollers to texture these earthy pigments and create varying levels of opacity within the same colour field.

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