Important Notice

It was in the early 1960s, when Gaitonde was painting in a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute in Mumbai, that he began his experiments with pigment and texture to create a series of large, ‘non-objective’ canvases. Travelling to the United States in 1964 on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Gaitonde encountered and was deeply moved by the work of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko, cementing his beliefs that painting... It was in the early 1960s, when Gaitonde was painting in a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute in Mumbai, that he began his experiments with pigment and texture to create a series of large, ‘non-objective’ canvases. Travelling to the United States in 1964 on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Gaitonde encountered and was deeply moved by the work of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko, cementing his beliefs that painting was an experimental process, that no painting was limited to a single frame or canvas, and that every artwork contained the seed or beginnings of another.

By the mid 1960s, then, Gaitonde’s creative process had been transformed into a lyrical yet tightly controlled one, where the artist painstakingly created and manipulated colour, light and space through the play of pigments across the surface. A stickler for process and perfection, Gaitonde once noted that, “Painting is a struggle – you have to enquire, you have to have a thinking mind…A painting always exists within you, even before you actually start to paint. You just have to make yourself the perfect machine to express what is already there” (as quoted in Meera Menezes, “The Meditative Brushstroke”, Art India, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1998, p. 69).

The present lot, painted in 1969, illustrates the perfection that Gaitonde achieved in controlling light and shade through pigment, with its subtle gradations of deep reds and blacks running from the darker lower edge of the surface to its brighter upper margin. Containing the forms that emerge from and sink into the multi-layered surface, the understated borders at the upper and lower edges of the canvas add to the painting’s unique sense of depth without negating its expansive, weightless presence.

Characterizing Gaitonde’s paintings from the period as juxtapositions of reticence and expansiveness, Jaya Appasamy notes, “The whole composition is more or less one colour in which the gentle gradations form a liquid matrix in which small and more solid outcrops of form appear to float. The style itself is reticent saying or suggesting only the least that needs to be stated. The colours too are limited and quiet and often consist of hues of the same colour. The whole painting has a certain expansiveness because the composition is open and can be thought of as part of a larger reality” (Lalit Kala Contemporary 19-20, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1975, p. 6).

Like his other canvases of the late 1960s, this large work mirrors the artist’s focus on process, having been slowly developed through the studied application and partial removal of different layers of paint with a roller and palette knife. Though his perfectionism and meticulous process resulted in a very limited number of works, each of these rare canvases succeeds in pushing Gaitonde’s viewers to look beyond the image and the surface, and to engage with his unique philosophy of artistic creation.

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