Important Notice

It was in the early 1960’s, when Gaitonde was painting at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute in Mumbai with artists like Padamsee and M.F. Husain, that he began his experiments with layering and texture to create a series of what he termed, not abstract, but ‘non-objective’ canvases. In 1964, he traveled to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and was exposed to American post-war art. Inspired by the work of abstract... It was in the early 1960’s, when Gaitonde was painting at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute in Mumbai with artists like Padamsee and M.F. Husain, that he began his experiments with layering and texture to create a series of what he termed, not abstract, but ‘non-objective’ canvases. In 1964, he traveled to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and was exposed to American post-war art. Inspired by the work of abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko and Paul Klee, it became Gaitonde’s belief that no painting was limited to one canvas as in every piece there was the seed or germination of another. Painting, to this artist, was a process – the play of pigments on a surface through which space, color and light were created and manipulated.

This canvas, from 1969, illustrates the perfection of Gaitonde’s control of light through pigment, with its subtle gradations of blues and blacks running from the darker and more heavily worked on center of the piece to its brighter upper and lower margins. Like many of his other canvases from the period, this is a work about process, and has been slowly developed through several layers in order to push its viewer’s to look beyond the surface and understand Gaitonde’s philosophy about art and creation.

For the artist, painting was a never ending experiment as well as a constant personal metamorphosis. So focused was Gaitonde on the perfection of his craft that he eventually isolated himself from all people and things that were not essential to his creative process, and only allowed paintings that he considered perfect to survive. The slow and meticulous process he adopted of building up and removing layers of pigment with a roller and palette knife to create his desired effects, combined with his untimely death in 2001, have made Gaitonde one of the least prolific of all modern Indian artists. “The creating of texture in an unconventional way, the use of thick lugubrious pigment, the evocation of light and finally, the subtle balancing of the image on the canvas as if it were undulating on water and gradually surfacing in the light, all these are attainments of a time when the individual canvases may not be too distinctive” (Dyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademie, 1973, unpaginated).

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