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“The landscape has no boundaries...”
AKBAR PADAMSEE
PROPERTY FROM A PROMINENT PRIVATE COLLECTION,
MUMBAI
12
AKBAR PADAMSEE
(b. 1928)
Landscape
1965
Oil on canvas
32.75 x 32.75 in (82.9 x 82.9 cm)
$ 156,250 ‒ 234,375
Rs 1,00,00,000 ‒ 1,50,00,000
PROVENANCE:
Acquired from Art Heritage, New Delhi
EXHIBITED:
Retrospective Show
, presented by New Delhi: Art Heritage at
Mumbai: Jehangir Art Gallery, 12‒20 January 1980
PUBLISHED:
Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds.,
Akbar
Padamsee: Work in Language
, Mumbai: Marg Publications
and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 208, 353 (illustrated)
Akbar Padamsee’s travels through India, Europe and North America during
the 1950s and early 1960s prompted him to explore landscape painting as
he encountered diverse terrains. Transcending notions of time and space,
these landscapes became the central focus of his artistic practice during
this decade. “Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se,
the artist’s object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his
visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual
experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist
recognition.” (Beth Citron, “Akbar Padamsee’s Artistic Landscape of the ’60s”,
Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds.,
Akbar Padamsee: Work
in Language
, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)
The landscapes from 1965 in particular were significantly dark, reduced to
their essentials and stripped of any details evident in previous works. The
muted colours and brushstrokes create an “expansive sense of great open,
uninhabitable ground” in which the seen landscape is redefined as an
experienced abstraction. In the present lot, a small vestige of recognisable
architecture remains in the building‒like form nestled in mid‒field. Writing
of the present lot, Citron states: “
Landscape
beams an impossibly angled light
source across a consciously vast and desolate terrain, interrupted only by the
presence of a single vacant house and mirrored by the polar, darkened sky
above... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panaromas of
unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer’s attention to the rhetorical
emptiness of these landscapes...” (Padamsee and Garimella eds., pp. 206, 208)
Delta
, 1963
Saffronart, New Delhi, 2015, lot 48
Sold at INR 3 crores (USD 461,538)
Landscape
, 1967
Reproduced from Padamsee and Garimella
eds., p. 210
Similar landscapes from the 1960s
Kali Pundole with the present lot at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai in 1980
Reproduced from Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 353
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