Important Notice

Through his rugged, sweeping landscapes, meticulously faceted with a palette knife, Akbar Padamsee manages to simultaneously freeze the passage of time and communicate an impression of the interminable. These unyielding vistas are marked by other oppositions as well. They are quiet, yet commanding; engaging, yet distant.

Relying on stark visuals rather than compound narratives to represent these dualities, the artist skillfully... Through his rugged, sweeping landscapes, meticulously faceted with a palette knife, Akbar Padamsee manages to simultaneously freeze the passage of time and communicate an impression of the interminable. These unyielding vistas are marked by other oppositions as well. They are quiet, yet commanding; engaging, yet distant.

Relying on stark visuals rather than compound narratives to represent these dualities, the artist skillfully uses scale, texture and a dramatic primary palette to convey the overwhelming presence and power of Nature in these works. Governed by no external force and devoid of any human imprint or specific location in space and time, Padamsee has termed these primal landscapes Metascapes – elemental microcosms of the universe and its basic constituents that transcend the convolutions of existence as we know and experience it. In the present lot, then, the blistering plains and distant hills are no more than Earth, and the grey sky simply Air. The artist’s metascapes “…include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In these paintings the image prods the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the ore. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent” (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1979, p. 36).

In addition to his studies of the Sanskrit language and of Chinese painting traditions, Padamsee’s “…more recent landscapes are inspired by the philosophic concepts of Kalidasa as expressed in his famous drama Sakuntala, the very same work which had inspired Goethe two centuries earlier. Padamsee calls them Metascapes in which water is ‘the origin of all life, and the sun and the moon as the controllers of time’. Painted in pulsating blues, glowing oranges and whites, suns burn and moons shine on primordial land and seascapes of haunting majesty” (Balraj Khanna and Aziz Kurtha, Art of Modern India, Thames and Hudson, London, 1998, p. 34).

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