Important Notice

"The landscape has no boundaries..."- AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's travels through India, Europe and North America during the 1950s and early 1960s prompted him to explore landscape painting as he encountered diverse terrains. Transcending notions of time and space, these landscapes became the central focus of his artistic practice during this decade. "Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist's... "The landscape has no boundaries..."- AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's travels through India, Europe and North America during the 1950s and early 1960s prompted him to explore landscape painting as he encountered diverse terrains. Transcending notions of time and space, these landscapes became the central focus of his artistic practice during this decade. "Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist's object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition." (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic Landscape of the '60s", Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)

The landscapes from 1965 in particular were significantly dark, reduced to their essentials and stripped of any details evident in previous works. The muted colours and brushstrokes create an "expansive sense of great open, uninhabitable ground" in which the seen landscape is redefined as an experienced abstraction. In the present lot, a small vestige of recognisable architecture remains in the building-like form nestled in mid-field. Writing of the present lot, Citron states: "Landscape beams an impossibly angled light source across a consciously vast and desolate terrain, interrupted only by the presence of a single vacant house and mirrored by the polar, darkened sky above... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panaromas of unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer's attention to the rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes..." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., pp. 206, 208)

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