Important Notice

Transcending the limitations of 'conventional geography', Akbar Padamsee's landscapes have always challenged his viewers' notions of time and space. "Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist's object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition" (Beth... Transcending the limitations of 'conventional geography', Akbar Padamsee's landscapes have always challenged his viewers' notions of time and space. "Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist's object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition" (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic Landscape of the '60s", Akbar Padamsee - Work in Language, Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p. 195).

Distilling his earlier experiments with the genre of landscape, Padamsee began painting his seminal series of Metascapes in 1970, after closely studying the Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala) by Kalidas. One verse in particular, which referred to the sun and the moon as the 'two controllers of time', inspired Padamsee to "…work with landscape compositions that manipulated eight natural elements, fashioning an imagined terrain in which the elements are not necessarily real and don't refer to actual places" (Ibid., p. 214). The artist coined the term Metascape to describe these ideal landscapes, stripped of all geographic and chronologic specificity.

Describing this major point of inflection in his work, Padamsee noted, "I'm not interested in location or landscape. My general theme is nature - mountains, trees, water, the elements, and obviously one is influenced by the environment, but I'm not interested in painting Rajasthan or the desert of whatever. When I paint a tree, a mountain, or a river, I am really interested in 'the river', 'the mountain', 'the tree'. The paintings are neither abstract nor representational" (as quoted in Eunice D'Souza, "Akbar Padamsee's Metascapes", The Economic Times, 30 November 1975).

The present lot, one of Padamsee's earliest Metascapes, illustrates the importance that the artist attributed to colour, texture and orchestration over location and mimesis in this series of works. These works, endless and eternal, "…include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In the paintings the image prods the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the ore. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent" (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1979, p. 36).

In this early metascape, as in the later ones Padamsee painted, "...brilliantly choreographed planes of light and dark made in thick impasto which evoke mountains, field, sky and water. The controlled cadence of the colors breaks into a throbbing intensity as the artist in his most masterly works, evokes infinite time and space" (Yashodhara Dalmia, Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1997, p. 17).

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