Important Notice

Following the 1970s and the early 1980s, when quiet, mythical landscapes dominated Akbar Padamsee’s creative output, the artist returned to the figure in the mid 1980s. Although his style had evolved considerably since the first portraits he painted in the early 1950s, the reverence with which the artist approached the portrait, particularly those of solitary figures, remained constant.

In the present lot, a large-format portrait... Following the 1970s and the early 1980s, when quiet, mythical landscapes dominated Akbar Padamsee’s creative output, the artist returned to the figure in the mid 1980s. Although his style had evolved considerably since the first portraits he painted in the early 1950s, the reverence with which the artist approached the portrait, particularly those of solitary figures, remained constant.

In the present lot, a large-format portrait executed in 1987, Padamsee uses thick layers of oil paint, applied with a palette knife, to literally etch the portrait of a middle-aged man out of the background, which bears the hallmarks of his early, dark metascapes. The earthy palette of browns and reds used by the artist enhances the somber mood already set by the man’s pensive expression. Nevertheless, the figure, like Padamsee’s other solitary subjects, does not come across as a victim of circumstance. Rather, he strikes viewers as an intensely private man having weathered loss and sorrow at the hands of passing time, inadvertently transforming them into voyeurs.

Eunice de Souza terms this distance or division that Padamsee creates between his subjects and viewers a ‘separateness’, saying that most of the artist’s figures “…evoke a sense of vulnerability and anguish, yet none of them are simple victim figures. They are not merely alone, but essentially separate from the viewer. This separateness is so persistent a feature of the paintings that one is forced to ask whether it arises out of a sense of the privacy of the self, or an uncompromising existential search in which each man or woman is irrevocably alone” (Akbar Padamsee, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, 1980, not paginated).

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