Important Notice

This is the only seascape that Akbar Padamsee ever painted. This vast canvas of a stormy sea was originally commissioned from the artist by Naval Vakil, a prominent lawyer in Mumbai, who was an important collector and patron to many Indian Modernists. Vakil once called Padamsee to his Napean Sea Road home and asked him to paint the sea as seen from his window. Painted in 1970, this seascape marks the beginning of a landmark decade in the... This is the only seascape that Akbar Padamsee ever painted. This vast canvas of a stormy sea was originally commissioned from the artist by Naval Vakil, a prominent lawyer in Mumbai, who was an important collector and patron to many Indian Modernists. Vakil once called Padamsee to his Napean Sea Road home and asked him to paint the sea as seen from his window. Painted in 1970, this seascape marks the beginning of a landmark decade in the artist's career and yet recalls the broad panoramic scale of his monochromatic "Grey Works" from the early 1960s. Padamsee captures the turbulence of the sea through variations of blue, black and brown. Brushstrokes change direction capturing the fluidity and movement of the ocean, simulating the churning of waves. The disquieting swatches of black and blue mirror the night sky and echo the dark depths of the ocean. This work stands poised between Padamsee's exploration of nature as an "objective phenomenon", and his depiction of space to transcend realism and physicality, as he does in his Metascape series of the 1970s.

Art critic Geeta Kapur elaborates on the emotional content of Padamsee's paintings. "Anything that is worth contemplating is possessed of a solitude and indeed Akbar's landscapes are immensely solitary. Giorgio de Chirico, an artist whom Akbar has always admired, speaks of two kinds of solitude in works of art: "plastic solitude" which is the contemplative beatitude offered to us by the artist's genius of construction or formal combination; and "metaphysical solitude" in which the artist, presumably treating space as an extended field of his unconscious, projects signs into the infinite and invests it with meaning." ("Akbar Padamsee: the other side of solitude", Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 1978, accessed online) Padamsee's interpretation of the sea in the present lot offers a "plastic solitude... an aesthetic form-a contemplative beatitude." (Kapur, accessed online)

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