Important Notice

Painted in 2001, the present lot is part of a series of three still lifes that Jehangir Sabavala executed in response to Gertrude Stein's famous line from her 1913 poem Sacred Emily, 'A Rose is a Rose is a Rose'. Illuminating the inherent beauty in things we often take for granted, Sabavala's canvases from this period represent "…occasions of light, picked out and marked against the pervasive darkness of our times, visions of redemption". In... Painted in 2001, the present lot is part of a series of three still lifes that Jehangir Sabavala executed in response to Gertrude Stein's famous line from her 1913 poem Sacred Emily, 'A Rose is a Rose is a Rose'. Illuminating the inherent beauty in things we often take for granted, Sabavala's canvases from this period represent "…occasions of light, picked out and marked against the pervasive darkness of our times, visions of redemption". In these works, "…Sabavala journeys through the ruins of human enterprise, looking again for the lost places and lost times that have long fascinated him, summoning them forth in paintings whose lyrical felicity of handling accentuates their tone of elegiac power" (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs, Mumbai, 2005, p. 168).

These flowers, rendered in mid-bloom, also recall the many vacations that the artist spent in Pune, Matheran and Mahabaleshwar, all retreats where his family maintained holiday homes. As Hoskote explains, "His celebration of the ecstasy and trauma of the natural world, which was to be evinced with increasing strength in his work after the 1960s, has its origins in the vivid impressions of his Indian childhood…The hill station of Mahabaleshwar is synonymous, to Sabavala, with the new acquaintances that he made in the vegetable kingdom while on his first holiday there: cobra lilies, fuchsias, the rambler rose…These stimuli, these sensual invitations of nature are textured into Sabavala's being. It is in this 'cloistered, perfumed world' that Sabavala believes his oblique sensuality, his tactile appetite for mineral, animal and floral forms was first aroused" (Ibid., p. 82, 84).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site