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. His later paintings, like the present lot, "...reflect certain essential features of poetic form; the brevity of elements, the multiple... 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. His later paintings, like the present lot, "...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, not paginated).

This canvas, aptly titled 'Mythical Reality', is sparsely populated with a selection of architectural forms and fragments seemingly borrowed from various ancient structures including a Roman Coliseum. Placed against a background neatly divided by colour into three horizontal segments, they represent a manifestation of the various explorations of material, form, space and perspective that Barwe undertook since the early 1970s.

Reflecting on the connections between these economically rendered forms and the artist's unique idiom of poetic abstraction, Deepak Ghare notes, "In Barwe's paintings the mutual relationships of the concrete and the abstract lead us to the realization of space in numerous ways. Through a subtle play of identification and abstraction Barwe probes deep into the vast expanse of the inner mind, and into the memories of the past. In Barwe's work, elements like a chair, a building, or a leaf, are transformed into abstract shapes liberated from their narrow meanings in the material world, giving us experience of purity and spontaneity. Barwe's paintings are at once representative, real, and abstract in their essence" (Expanding Horizons, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2008, p. 97).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site