Important Notice

"Love and fear have faces, they have eyes and mouth." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee, a deeply intellectual artist, has addressed his concerns with the metaphysical definitions of form and space through his paintings, drawings, photography, film-making and sculpture. In the 1950s, he made masks in beaten metal, and in 1984-85 he worked on a group of free standing bronze masks and heads, which were cast in a foundry in Mumbai.... "Love and fear have faces, they have eyes and mouth." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee, a deeply intellectual artist, has addressed his concerns with the metaphysical definitions of form and space through his paintings, drawings, photography, film-making and sculpture. In the 1950s, he made masks in beaten metal, and in 1984-85 he worked on a group of free standing bronze masks and heads, which were cast in a foundry in Mumbai. In an interview when these sculptures were exhibited in Delhi and Mumbai, he stated, "Sculpting and form, it is difficult to distance oneself... The head frees one of that. Th ere is an experimental quality about these." (Artist quoted in Laxmi Lal, "I Need To Be In A State Of Grace," The Times of India, 11 May 1986) Th is experiment seems to have lasted for only a brief period of time, and he made only a few of these bronze sculptures, perhaps because he did not enjoy the many intermediaries needed in the casting process. As a result they are rare, and hard to come by.

Poignancy and isolation mark the frozen silence of the singular face, as seen in the present lot, and yet there seems to be a whole range of emotions on display. "Apart from their startling, sinister beauty... his sculptures have a striking power of penetration and hold the possibility of visualizing a tangible object which defi es identification as the surrealistic subconscious is dredged... Enigmatic as they are, each viewing results not in familiarity but in fresh discoveries." (Nanak Ganguly, "Akbar Padamsee's Sculptures," Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p.171) Padamsee's continued interest in constructed form is evident in the kneaded clay-like metalworking technique. "They are like pieces of space covered by the unity of a single, simple gesture." (Ganguly, p. 167)

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