Important Notice

Lot 10

In addition to being a prolific writer and political activist, Swaminathan was a painter who strove throughout his career to develop a unique vocabulary that represented the realities of nature and the universe it represents. During his tenure as Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal in the late 1980`s, the artist spent a lot of time researching the symbolic basis of several forms of Indian tribal art, some of which he had... In addition to being a prolific writer and political activist, Swaminathan was a painter who strove throughout his career to develop a unique vocabulary that represented the realities of nature and the universe it represents. During his tenure as Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal in the late 1980`s, the artist spent a lot of time researching the symbolic basis of several forms of Indian tribal art, some of which he had initially explored in the 1960`s. In an effort to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors, the artist adopted much of this ancient symbology in his own work. 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.

Executed shortly before his death in 1994, these paintings differ from his experiments with tribal art in the early 1960`s 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 exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 117).

Simultaneously experimenting with technique, Swaminathan used natural pigments bound to the surface with a wax based medium in this series. Emulating tribal wall paintings, the artist employed his own fingers and rubber rollers to texture these earthy pigments and create varying levels of opacity within the same color field.

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