Important Notice

Influenced by the work of artists Joan Miro and Paul Klee during his student years, and later by Indian folk art and tantric symbolism, Prabhakar Barwe spent much of his artistic career perfecting his unique abstract vocabulary so that he could explore each nuance of form and space through his painting. In his later works, including the present lot, seemingly unrelated objects float in space. Yet, each element of these compositions holds... Influenced by the work of artists Joan Miro and Paul Klee during his student years, and later by Indian folk art and tantric symbolism, Prabhakar Barwe spent much of his artistic career perfecting his unique abstract vocabulary so that he could explore each nuance of form and space through his painting. In his later works, including the present lot, seemingly unrelated objects float in space. Yet, each element of these compositions holds symbolic meaning for the artist, and thus, each is related to the others with which it shares the frame.

This impeccable canvas from 1994, probably one of the last works Barwe completed, is testament to the artist’s distinctive style and to the poetic economy of the idiom he spent his career refining. Here, Barwe places a selection of organic and inorganic forms, drained of all colour, against an equally austere background. These careful arrangements on the artist’s canvases “…reflect certain essential features of poetic form; the brevity of elements, the multiple resonance of their meanings, a certain instantness of something grasped lucidly. These paintings do not reflect the world but rather show one way of seeing reality and at once experiencing it. The profound stillness that emanates from this space is a contemplative silence in which the spectator’s eye is turned inward” (V. Sharma, Prabhakar Barwe, Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 1987, unpaginated).

The medium Barwe has used in this work is enamel house paint diluted with a variety of solvents like turpentine, which he began to work with in the 1970s. Using enamel paint, the artist achieved “a delicacy akin to watercolour...His brushwork became practically invisible, and strong colour gave way to muted shades…The artist’s mature works correspond to his disposition – they are quiet, self-effacing, and almost monastic” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2005, p.15).

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