Important Notice

"From the very beginning of my life as a painter it has been my aim to be able to express my joys and sorrows through colour and line as freely as a child expresses its hunger by crying or its joy through laughter. For this purpose, I had to learn the vocabulary of art and also draw sustenance from the vast treasure accumulated from the past and practiced at present all over the world" (Voyage in Images, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1991, not... "From the very beginning of my life as a painter it has been my aim to be able to express my joys and sorrows through colour and line as freely as a child expresses its hunger by crying or its joy through laughter. For this purpose, I had to learn the vocabulary of art and also draw sustenance from the vast treasure accumulated from the past and practiced at present all over the world" (Voyage in Images, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1991, not paginated).

A pioneer of Indian modernism, Hebbar combined Indian and Western influences in both his style and the subjects he chose to portray. Early in his career, he renounced the academic realism that he was trained in at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai for a more personal idiom that better suited the themes he wanted to explore in his work. "Hebbar is a difficult artist to tag a name on. He is unorthodox, though trained in an orthodox western style. Avowedly an Indian mannerist, he is free from pseudo-traditional clichés. Though a lover of non-realistic forms, he is not an abstractionist. Deeply interested in the inter-weave of forms and space, he cannot be called a cubist. The different modalities of modern painting, however, are touched on and off, without making a creed" (V.R. Amberkar, Hebbar, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1960, not paginated).

Influenced by the work of artists ranging from Amrita Sher-Gil to Paul Gauguin, and by various schools of Indian miniatures, Hebbar painted landscapes inspired by pan-Indian themes. His narratives, however, were localized by the specific places he had travelled to, and depicted events from the everyday life of the common man. The present lot, a Mumbai seascape, is part of a series of canvases the artist painted in the early 1990s depicting the city's coastal fishing communities, and showcases Hebbar's confident yet graceful line and his unique daubing application of colour on the surface.

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