Important Notice

“True darkness gives one a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere.” - GANESH PYNE

Ganesh Pyne’s deeply personal and emotive works mirror the artist’s introspective and quiet understanding of the world. “Pyne likes to think of himself as a medievalist. And indeed, his visual imagination, like that of the visionaries and mystics of the past, sees beyond the... “True darkness gives one a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere.” - GANESH PYNE

Ganesh Pyne’s deeply personal and emotive works mirror the artist’s introspective and quiet understanding of the world. “Pyne likes to think of himself as a medievalist. And indeed, his visual imagination, like that of the visionaries and mystics of the past, sees beyond the rational, material world around him to the altered reality of an enchanted world...He is most at home with his own inner world of darkness and light from which emerges the strange forms. The canvases are a reflection of this all-absorbing interior life.” (Ella Datta, Ganesh Pyne: His Life and Times, Calcutta: Centre of International Modern Art, 1998, p. 17)

Known as a “creator of atmospheres,” Pyne’s artistic vocabulary possesses both “...self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact. Of course, there is also an occluded playfulness that inhabits Pyne’s more apparent melancholia: his secrecy follows a method of allusion, but his references can be made to unknown or invented sources, giving his allegory an edge of unpredictability.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne,” Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Mumbai: Galerie 88, 2005, p. 10, 16)

His works reflect an ongoing fascination with death - a result of the experiences faced by him and his family during the communal riots in Bengal in 1946. “Pyne’s ‘signature’ style is shaped by his own experiences of solitude and alienation that he had lived through and aided by the pain and horror he had witnessed in the city of Calcutta during the sixties of the last century. What surfaced in his art however appear as mysteriously enriched with moods of tenderness and calm serenity, rich with visual depth in which every single stroke appears charged with muted eloquence.” (Arun Ghose, Jottings as Paintings of Ganesh Pyne, Agra: Sanchit Art Gallery, 2014, p. 2)

At the same time, memories of the fairy tales and epics narrated by his grandmother, and his childhood home and surroundings manifest in his paintings in unconventional ways. “The architectural arabesque that was the family home, the strange-looking shadows cast by the listeners on the surrounding walls, the narrow lane...created the ambience of his grandmother’s tales.” (Sovon Som, An Enchanted Space: The Private World of Ganesh Pyne, Kolkata: Centre of International Modern Art, 2005, p. 13)

The mid-1960s saw Pyne’s style undergoing a radical transformation when he switched from watercolours to his preferred medium of tempera. As a result, his “palette darkened considerably. The dramatic change so wonderful to observe, made him straddle the chasm between several generations of artists.” (Datta, p. 14)

These changes thus caused a parallel change in Pyne’s style of figuration - one that involved the frequent presence of ghoulish figures in emaciated or skeletal form, or faces with hollowed out and blank eyes, as seen in the present lot. Pyne’s use of light here highlights only the figure that occupies a majority of the canvas, leaving the rest of the space around him blank, thereby adding to the strength of the composition.

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