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Lot 52

 

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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

In 1963 and 1964 Padamsee travelled to New York and across North America on a John D Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and this exposure led to a new phase in his work. "Padamsee's works from these two years attest to his first breakings from the use of landscape for formalist study or the... "I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

In 1963 and 1964 Padamsee travelled to New York and across North America on a John D Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and this exposure led to a new phase in his work. "Padamsee's works from these two years attest to his first breakings from the use of landscape for formalist study or the rehearsal of the Western (especially French) classical tradition." (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic "Landscape" of the '60s," Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, pp. 203, 206) The present lot, painted in 1964, is a fine example of this period of movement away from the figurative landscape, and before he began developing his Metascapes. It contains the monochromes of his earlier Grey Works but hints at the fuller colour palette that would follow in his later, brighter landscapes.

During this period, Padamsee worked with a limited, somewhat subdued palette, creating landscapes which contained some recognisable elements from nature, but are otherwise stripped of all geographic or chronological specificity. In the present lot, elements of a landscape are suggested by indications of a blue water body and some land masses and trees. 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." (Citron, pp. 206, 208) Here, 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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