Important Notice

Lot 11

During the late 1980s, Swaminathan`s canvases underwent a dramatic shift, in terms of technique, style and subject. Abandoning the pristine depictions of nature in his Mountain, Bird and Tree series, the artist shifted his focus towards a more primitive communication of the unrealized universe through tantric forms and tribal signs. During his tenure as Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, the artist gained a deep... During the late 1980s, Swaminathan`s canvases underwent a dramatic shift, in terms of technique, style and subject. Abandoning the pristine depictions of nature in his Mountain, Bird and Tree series, the artist shifted his focus towards a more primitive communication of the unrealized universe through tantric forms and tribal signs. During his tenure as Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, the artist gained a deep knowledge of the symbolic basis of several forms of tribal art, which he used in this series to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors.

Executed shortly before his death in 1994, these paintings differ from his experiments with tribal art in the early 1960s in that they are not concerned with the known connotations of signs, but with an entirely new representational language. Their 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, 2002, p. 117).

Here, a triangle, perhaps symbolic of Arunachal, the mountain home of Shiva, is the focus of the lower canvas, and calligraphic markings resembling two birds flanking an anthropomorphic sun populate its upper panel. Whereas individually these elements may be read as “non descriptive, partially associated images”, when assembled they take on a collective significance open to multiple interpretations. As Geeta Kapur explains, although the images Swaminathan uses belong to the past, “Through the transformed context and relationships in his painting, they become one with traditional and contemporary, because they are born of a motivation that bridges the two in a continuum” (“Reaching Out to the Past” in Lalit Kala Contemporary, no. 40, 1995, p. 17).

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