EVENING SALE | LIVE AUCTION, MUMBAI (16 FEBRUARY 2017)

The present lot, with its expansive colour fields signals

a shift towards abstraction from Padamsee’s structured

landscapes of the early 1960s. The fiery red that forms

the central band, sandwiched between the darker

horizontals, is a precursor to Padamsee’s Metascape

series that followed in the 1970s, dominated by richly

textured and vivid palettes of red and blue. In works

such as the present lot, Padamsee began constructing

landscapes focussing on form, structure and colour,

which were devoid of indications of space and time.

This painting shares a sensibility of abstraction in the

landscape with Padamsee’s 1963 painting titled

Delta

in which too, colours are layered to suggest a ghost‒like

fluidity which defies identification.

Padamsee’s works from the 1960s, as seen in the

present lot, “...tend towards stark and dark reduction,

resulting in compositions that appear significantly more

conceptualized than the earlier series, if still legible and

oriented as landscapes... by formally pulling back and

presenting angular, broad panoramas of unpopulated

land, Padamsee draws the viewer’s attention to the

rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes; that is, rather

than these vistas appearing coincidentally or casually

as if there are no people passing through them, they

demonstrate a conscious, strategic approach to appear

exclusively non‒figural.” (Bhanumati Padamsee and

Annapurna Garimella eds.,

Akbar Padamsee: Work in

Language

, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art

Gallery, 2010, pp. 206, 208)

"I don't paint forms, forms emerge from the dynamism of movement."

 AKBAR PADAMSEE