Important Notice

The current work follows Swaminathan's well-known Bird and Mountain series of the late 1960s - early '70s, where natural elements such as birds, trees, mountains and the sun featured as leitmotifs in pure colour. His experimentation with it was an important precursor to his shift to Primitivism. While in Madhya Pradesh in 1981, he set up the Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, and conceived it to be a composite wing... The current work follows Swaminathan's well-known Bird and Mountain series of the late 1960s - early '70s, where natural elements such as birds, trees, mountains and the sun featured as leitmotifs in pure colour. His experimentation with it was an important precursor to his shift to Primitivism. While in Madhya Pradesh in 1981, he set up the Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, and conceived it to be a composite wing showcasing urban, folk and tribal art. His appreciation of the semiotics of folk and tribal arts intensified in this period and he continued to seek an idiom free from the paradoxes of modernism. In his essay The New Promise, he criticises prevailing notions of modernism in India as a compromise arrived at by appropriating concepts from the West and grafting those on to indigenous folk and miniature styles. Viewed in conjunction with what the artist was aiming at in his essays and his oeuvre, this work gains immense significance. Here, Swaminathan seems to have found a language that addresses his theoretical concerns with a painterly device. He has wielded the roller to extract not only a magical quality of colour but also forms that are architectonic. Here, symbols, geometry and colour are in perfect harmony.

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