Important Notice

Born in 1928 in Shimla, Jagdish Swaminathan, by his own account, was a mischievous, willful child who had liked to draw and paint. He returned to his childhood love and began painting full-time in the 1950s. In 1962, he formed the short-lived artists’ collective, Group 1890, which was opposed to both the idealism of the Bengal School and mannerism of European Modernism. Swaminathan also had a profound interest in the underlying symbolism of the... Born in 1928 in Shimla, Jagdish Swaminathan, by his own account, was a mischievous, willful child who had liked to draw and paint. He returned to his childhood love and began painting full-time in the 1950s. In 1962, he formed the short-lived artists’ collective, Group 1890, which was opposed to both the idealism of the Bengal School and mannerism of European Modernism. Swaminathan also had a profound interest in the underlying symbolism of the folk and tribal art of Central India. He experimented with these totemic symbols in a constant quest to simplify them and create a new pictorial language.

After studying Pahari miniatures in the late 1960s, he began a series called the Colour Geometry of Space in an attempt to understand the relation of colour to space. He remarks, “I believe that the analytical and constructivist approach in Western painting had attempted to build space, whereas space by its very nature is that which is not manifest. The triangle and the rectangle and the circle as colour, I find, are windows on the Avyaktam, the unmanifested.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “Colour-Geometry: Catalogue of Exhibition, 1967,” Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 21)

Through a deeply contemplative artistic practice, Swaminathan sought to present not reality but a “poetic rendering of ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space.” Comprising two panels of khadi fabric on either side of a painted canvas, the present lot exemplifies the artist’s experiments with space and structure. The work features simplified geometrical forms, in hues of lemon yellow, pink, orange, and pale green, arranged on flat planes of colour.

Describing Swaminathan’s technique which lends a luminosity to the work and has roots in Indian art traditions, art historian and critic Geeta Kapur remarks, “Undertaking to “dematerialize” the gross paint-matter, he thins down the pigment to a transparent consistency almost of watercolour. The thinned pigment soaked into the canvas retains the sheen of oils. The colours are lucid… Precisely the one pictorial element in the use of which Swaminathan excels, is colour.” (Geeta Kapur, “J. Swaminathan,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 210)

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