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Lot 36

 

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"I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

This Classic Metascape was painted in 1961, following Padamsee's brief period of grey works. He continued working with a limited palette in the following decade, and moved towards landscapes which contained some recognisable elements from nature, such as mountains or rivers, but are... "I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

This Classic Metascape was painted in 1961, following Padamsee's brief period of grey works. He continued working with a limited palette in the following decade, and moved towards landscapes which contained some recognisable elements from nature, such as mountains or rivers, but are otherwise stripped of all geographic or chronological specificity. In the present lot, a meandering river is visible in the foreground amid a gently sloping mountainous landscape set against a dark sky. Such works from the 1960s "...tend towards stark and dark reduction, resulting in compositions that appear significantly more conceptualized than the earlier series, if still legible and oriented as landscapes... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panoramas of unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer's attention to the rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes; that is, rather than these vistas appearing coincidentally or casually as if there are no people passing through them, they demonstrate a conscious, strategic approach to appear exclusively non-figural." (Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, pp. 206, 208) In the present lot, as in other works from this period, Padamsee constructs a landscape indicative of neither space nor time, focussing only on form, structure and colour.

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