Somnath Hore 1921–2006
Somnath Hore is respected not only as an important artist and a pioneer of modern Indian art but also as a political activist who had, throughout his life, boldly used his talents as a graphic artist and sculptor to express his own personal angst against a socio-political system which bred acts of violence. His most poignant and powerful statement was his pulp print series called ‘Wounds’. It was the cataclysmic decade of the 1940s, especially the Bengal Famine of 1943, which shaped and moulded his consciousness as an artist. A man of impeccable integrity and deep commitment, Somnath Hore often expressed his anguish at man’s inhumanity against man and blatant violations of human values—whether it be casteism, communalism, the frightful fallout from nuclear blasts and society’s inability to preserve human dignity.

Flood
bronze
15cm x 26cm x 15cm | 6" x 10.25" x 6"
1995 | from private collection

M.F. Husain 1915–current
For right reasons and wrong, the name Maqbul Fida Husain is synonymous with modern art in India. Born in 1915 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, Husain’s career as a painter started in Bombay in 1937 as a banner artist, painting large hoardings for popular Bombay cinema. This experience, along with his early discipline of copying the Koran by hand in fluid calligraphy, was to have a major influence on him as a painter. As a founding member of the avant-garde Progressive Artist Group set up in Bombay in 1947, Husain, like many youth of that euphoric period of India’s Independence, was anxious to forge a new vocabulary in Indian art. Husain was in fact one of the first modernist painters who made use of Indian motifs from Indian sources such as temple sculpture and miniatures and created a style in painting which was a brilliant synthesis of tradition and modernity. A multifaceted artist, Husain is recognized not only as a great painter but as an artist who is constantly innovating and experimenting with new ideas and medium, the most recent being cinema, using Bollywood superstar Madhuri Dixit and pop star Madonna as his source of inspiration to create yet another vocabulary in the world of art.

Knight Watch 2001 - 17
acrylic on canvas
106cm x 226cm | 41.75" x 89"
2002 | Con No. 3042

Jitish Kallat 1974–current
A graduate with a BFA (painting) from Mumbai’s J.J. School of Art, Jitish Kallat is very much the face of a new, dynamic India. His paintings incorporate modern technology and popular essentials like the photocopying machine, his works juxtapose the traditional symbol with the abstract, photocopied representation of a monument, his images evolve out of texts and captions, well-known phrases and popular song titles. The close relationship between words, images, tradition and contemporary symbols is central to Jitish’s work.

Rickshawpolis - 7
acrylic on canvas, bronze sculpture
172.5cm x 228.5cm and 27cm x 28.3cm x 47cm (each)
68" x 90" and 10.60" x 11.10" x 18.5" (each)
2006 | Con No. 4391

Prabhakar Mahadeo Kolte 1946–current
As a purely abstract painter Prabhakar Mahadeo Kolte’s concerns lie not in the world of tangible reality but in the intangible, the unseen essence which is hidden within. In his paintings, mostly ‘Untitled’ and of rectangular composition, Kolte creates bold bands of sensuous abstract forms in austere greys, with some flashes of pinks, mauves, whites, greens and blues, as if out of the mysterious depth there are glimpses of light, brightening up the surface of the painting. The poet-painter describes this as darshan, akin to a mystical experience or revelation. According to him, his “works reflect a state of vision that does not symbolize anything but itself. It is neither representative nor interpretative, neither expressive nor illustrative.” The subject is not important; it is the experience of abstract delight and ecstatic revelation his paintings evoke that matter. A brilliant teacher, lover of music and literature, Prabhakar Kolte is a committed artist who continues to inspire the young generation of contemporary India not to speak of the students of his alma mater, Mumbai’s J.J. School of Arts.

Untitled
acrylic on canvas
111.5cm x 119cm | 44" x 47"
2005 | Con No. 3833

Ram Kumar 1924–current
One of contemporary India’s leading painters, Ram Kumar actually started out as a short-story writer in Hindi for which he has received considerable recognition. It was a chance visit to an exhibition at the Sarada Ukil School of Art in Delhi that inspired young Ram Kumar to give in to his impulse and get himself enrolled. There he learnt painting from the awe-inspiring Sailoz Mookherjea. Later, Ram Kumar went to Paris and worked in the studio of Andre Lohte. Influenced by the Paris school, Ram Kumar’s early works were figurative but gradually, over the years, his works have turned more towards abstraction. It was his trip to Benaras with M.F. Husain that came as a turning point in his career. With his series of paintings based on Benaras cityscapes Ram Kumar emerged as a powerful, abstract landscape artist.

Untitled
oil on canvas
126.5cm x 177cm | 50" x 70"
1998 | from private collection

Nalini Malani 1946–current
Another product of the J.J. Schoolf of Arts, Nalini Malani is an artist with a social conscience for whom art for art’s sake has no meaning. The lives of the poor living in the chawls of Bombay and the alienation and helplessness of women preoccupy her and are expressed in her paintings. In her water colours, the figures—mostly that of women huddled together—loom large and occupy the major portion of the pictorial space and contribute towards making her work feminist art or a feminist perspective on real-life issues.

Stories Retold
reverse painting on Mylatr film
155cm x 100cm | 61" x 40"
2002 | Con No. 3480

Tyeb Mehta 1925–current
One of our modern Masters in every sense of the term, Tyeb Mehta has evolved a style and imagery which can easily be termed “Indian Expressionism”. Many art critics have commented on his affinity to Cubism and Francis Bacon and perhaps some stylistic elements of Barnett Newman, especially in his division of large spatial areas in terms of bright flat colours. But Tyeb has left all these influences behind him and has created his very own idiom rooted in the linear and two-dimensional spatial tradition of Indian art. Tyeb’s complete control over the medium and his ability to create tension with the use of sharp staccato lines and clearly demarcated areas of bright, flat colour result in works of great power and poignancy. With distorted figures, dislocated limbs and faces that are demented and out of focus, Tyeb Mehta expresses the deep sense of loneliness, alienation and even violence experienced by contemporary man. The recurring image in Tyeb’s paintings is that of the ‘Fallen Figure’, a symbol of our times.

Head of a Bull
bronze
20.5cm x 33.3cm x 43cm | 8" x 13" x 17"
1998 | Con No. 858

Durga
oil on canvas
149.5cm x 105cm | 59" x 41"
1993 | from private collection

Sailoz Mookherjea 1906-1960
Sailoz Mookherjea was, without doubt, a product of École de Paris although he responded to this only when it had relevance to the Indian context. Mookherjea maintained that if Matisse could reproduce the delicacy and elegance of Indian art in his works despite its French ethos, then an Indian artist should be able to reproduce the French savvy and élan in his work despite its Indian ethos. Sailoz Mookherjea was inspired by Indian folk art and Kangra miniatures and had many characteristics of the Bengal Revivalist School and nineteenth-century romanticism. His paintings have a clear subject matter but his scenes of reality were touched with a new poetry and a lyrical quality. Though based on elements of the real world, Sailoz Mookherjea was essentially a visionary. His main medium was oil painting. He was a great colourist as form interested him relatively little and he was always attracted to flat, coloured shapes. His brush lines are vivacious and decorative. The painting seen here is from his more mature phase. The work is more confident, spontaneous and lyrical, full of light and movement.

Mosque
oil on canvas
73cm x 97cm | 28.75" x 38"
1959 | Con No.

Binode Behari Mukherjee 1904-1980
Binode Behari Mukherjee was right up there at the front with those who established and consolidated the art movement of modern India. In the post-Independence period, when the Bengal Revivalist movement was dismissed lightly, Benode Behari gave it a new direction by both his paintings and writings. Plagued by weak eyesight (he later became blind), his curiosity for the visual world would not be dimmed. Benode Behari painted the wonder and mystery of nature, men and women engaged in their everyday chores. Creative pursuits for this artist were not independent of knowledge and critical appreciation. He was a man of unusual and varied intellectual interests that ranged from philosophy, psychology, religion to card playing and traditions in cooking. His tile-murals in Santiniketan show him to be a strong nonconformist; with them he ushered in a new kind of art potential. Benode Behari was not tied to any programme of art theory; to him each theory or movement was a vehicle in a wide range of ideologies which he adapted to suit his purpose.

Landscape
water colour on paper
26cm x 23.5cm | 10.25" x 9.25"
undated | from private collection

Meera Mukherjee 1923-1998
Although an intensely private person, Meera Mukherjee’s works reflect her commitment to ordinary people and her soil. Her themes are rural and urban, serious and playful; they arrest the viewer’s attention and are never stark or impersonal. In the Sixties she began working on the gigantic sculptures that became her trademark in the lost wax method which metal craftsmen of India had been using for centuries, though never in the size of Meera Mukherjee’s sculpting. Stella Kramrisch of Philadelphia Museum of Art once told her that this technique was never used for large sculptures. The Ghoruas of Bastar, the dhokras of West Bengal and the Malhars of tribal Bihar inspired her to experiment and develop an entirely new art form combining myths, folklore and traditional crafts. Her sculptures are usually accompanied by quotations which lead the viewer to emotionally respond to her works.

Ganga
bronze
24cm x 51.5cm x 42cm | 9.5" x 20.25"
1986 | from private collection

Akbar Padamsee 1928–current
Akbar Padamsee was one of the early pioneers of the 1940s to forge a new modernist style in Indian art. He passed out of the J.J. School of Art, Bombay, and joined his contemporary young radicals like Husain, Souza, Tyeb Mehta, Gaitonde to claim that they had “invented modernism” for Indian art. By this they meant rejecting India’s past traditions and looking to the Paris School for inspiration. In his search for modernism Akbar left for Paris in 1951 and lived and worked there till 1967. Akbar, whether in his figurative works or in his abstract ‘Metascapes’, could be described as being both cerebral as well as sensual. While on one hand Akbar deeply probes the existential aspects of the “modern personality” with all its elements of stress, alienation and solitude, on the other hand, in his treatment of the human form and in his handling of paint one notices elements of great sensuality. It is these conflicting elements of pain and tenderness that make his paintings both visually pleasing and intellectually provocative.

Nude-2
charcoal on paper
26cm x 37.5cm | 10.25" x 14.75"
2003 | Con No. 2971

Rm. Palaniappan 1957–current
Palaniappan works in mixed media prints, embellishing his works with such things as rubber stamps, wax seals, collage materials and embossing. Bright and young, Palaniappan is interested in aeronautics and systems of notation which signify the specifics of time, place and sequence. The imagery usually appears to have textural and landscape elements. “Man has always wanted to fly as flight was a kind of release from space and time,” Palaniappan has said in an interview. “Numbers interest me because they are both finite and infinite,” he added. The juxtaposition of the static and the mobile, words and images, freedom and limitations are not new to Indian art. But the unique manner of Palaniappan’s presentation is indeed novel. His works can be interpreted to be Western connotations from an Indian perspective.

A Demand for Immeadiate Clearance
conte crayon on treated paper
76cm x 57cm | 30" x 22.5"
2007 | Con No. 4681

A Message
conte crayon on treated paper
77cm x 57cm | 30" x 22.5"
2007 | Con No. 4682

Manu Parekh 1939–current
Manu Parekh’s artistic talents were noticed by the art teacher in his school in Ahmedabad who inspired him to take up painting seriously. Manu went on to receive his formal training at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay. A bold painter, Manu confronts the viewer with what he claims to be a “combination of the unexpected and the planned”. His surreal landscapes are fecund and fertile, expressing charged imagery of fantastical organisms, part-bird, part-woman, part-vegetation, growing in and out of one another. His raw and jagged imagery of brutalized men and animals is well known and his series on the infamous case of the Bhagalpur blindings in Bihar are haunting. Manu has always preferred to use the imagery of butchered animals as a symbol of the violent times we live in. However, his more recent work suggests that the artist is re-exploring his past series of landscapes.

Benares Landscape
oil on canvas
102cm x 152.5cm | 40" x 60"
2006 | Con No. 4607

Baiju Parthan 1956–current
Baiju Parthan is an artist with a mythopoeic imagination who has created a unique vocabulary based on the intriguing use of symbols and archaic imagery. Baiju completed his graduation from the Goa College of Art in Bombay, is a botanist by training and a cartoonist by experience but is also a self-taught scholar of comparative mythology and philosophy. All these diverse elements have shaped Baiju’s inner world. His paintings express the numinous world of the primitive man where the artist is the shaman who, through his “ceremonial art”, communes with the world of magic—perhaps black magic. Currently, Baiju is excited with the Dawkinsian idea of the “meme”. He is dwelling at length on ideas of “formalized historiography” versus the “information virus”. “Formalized history,” he believes, “is essential as a kind of collective memory. It is almost as though we have metabolized time and excreted history.” His emphasis obviously lies on the information virus which generates a collective memory, “more dynamic and real rather than static and residual.” Baiju continues to allude, question and engage. His works portray that mysterious trajectory.

Process (Hawkmoth)
pigment ink print on archival paper (signed edition of six)
91.4cm x 96.5cm | 36" x 38"
2007 | Con No. 4774

Process (Nautilus-Spira Mirabilis)
pigment ink print on archival paper (signed edition of six)
91.4cm x 96.5cm | 36" x 38"
2007 | Con No. 4775

Dashrath Patel 1927–current
One of India’s leading multi-dimensional artists, Dashrath Patel’s repertoire in the visual arts is vast indeed. At the same time, Dashrath is also a designer and helped establish the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. He received the Padma Shri in 1981 for excellence in design. Dashrath Patel has worked with some of the giants of contemporary art, both in India and internationally. His exploration with multi-dimensional mediums began with an early association with Harindranath Chattopadhya and Debiprasad Roy Chowdhury. Dashrath’s work with photography was inspired and initiated by Cartier-Bresson and an apprenticeship under Czech master Eckert got him interested in ceramics. In his work Dashrath has always interlinked the different art forms: “An artist who can paint should also sculpt, should have a feel for dance, music, photography. Only then can you capture the light and the colour and the sense of space that make up India.”

Freedom
paper collage on wooden structure
91.2cm x 91.2cm x 9cm | 36" x 36" x 3.5
2007 | Con No. 4672

Jeram Patel 1930–current
Jeram Patel’s art education between 1950 and 1955 was spread out over Mumbai and England. It included studying design, an aspect which resonates in his work. Jeram’s brush strokes of coiled movements, serpentine, reptilian postures hint at calligraphic and primordial settings. His strokes are energized and have upward surges, similar to the energy of Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptures. It is this energy which holds the form together; the tension prevents it from falling apart. The black ink-masses playing against the white and the various light and dark shades are a new evolution in Patel’s oeuvre.

Untitled
chinese ink on paper
56.7cm x 75.3cm | 22" x 30"
2006 | Con No. 4434

Ganesh Pyne 1937–current
Justly famous for his small tempera paintings, rich in imagery and symbols, Ganesh Pyne is one of the giants of Indian painters today. So much so that he is described as “an artist’s artist, a philosopher’s philosopher and master fantasist of them all.” Ganesh Pyne acknowledges the influence of great painters like Abanindranath Tagore, Hals Rembrandt and Paul Klee but he says that his exposure to Walt Disney’s cartoons and his own experience as a young animator in Calcutta finally liberated him and helped him develop two important stylistic features—distortion and exaggeration. He uses these to explore the deep recesses of his fantastical imagination to create uncanny images of disquieting creatures. The artist draws his inspiration from Bengal’s rich storehouse of folklore and mythology, stories that his grandmother told him in his childhood. The painter blends romanticism, fantasy and free form and an inventive play of light and shade to create a world of “poetic surrealism”. In the Indian miniature tradition, Pyne’s paintings should be savoured slowly and at leisure.

Neighbour
tempera on canvas
63.7cm x 55cm | 25" x 21.5"
2005 | Con No. 3921

Yogesh Rawal 1954–current
Yogesh Rawal never believed in half measures. From the J.J. School of Arts in Bombay he went on to study lithography at L’ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux-Arts and etching at Atelier-17, both in Paris. Having excelled in innumerable media and modes of art practice and having won many awards, he has finally settled down somewhere between Bhopal and Mumbai. “My travels and varied art practices have taught me one thing, and that is, I can make art under any situation and with any medium,” he has said. His works encompass fascinating collages, sculptures, prints and painted wooden surfaces. “My works stem from personal conversations with myself,” he has often said. Much of these dialogues are internalized and finally expressed through visual renderings. Yogesh feels that art teaching often misses out on some of the fundamentals of art practice. Light is one such fundamental on which Yogesh dwells at length. Much of his etchings have evolved from the study of light. He has also worked at length on minimalism and has subjected himself to rigorous restrictions by using only points and lines. Many of his current works resonate with the above idea and essentially express the pulsating rhythm of life-spirit, emanating at first from a point and then gradually spreading through the micro- and macrocosm. Yogesh is an artist’s artist and his works are subtle, sensitive and profound.

Untitled
paper collage, tissue paper, cellulose & synthetic resins on treated wood (diptych)
61cm x 205.8cm (each) | 24" x 81" (each)
2007 | Con No. 4673 a&b

Syed Haider Raza 1922-current
Syed Haider Raza is not only a painter who has given a new direction to the concept of abstraction in contemporary Indian art, he is also a pioneer who, along with artists like Husain, Gaitonde, Souza and Gade, introduced modernism into post-Independent Indian art. A resident of Paris since the Fifties, the genesis of Raza’s paintings is based on the concept of the bindu or the focal point of concentration that he had learnt about in his childhood in India. He had lived in a remote village in the primeval forests of Madhya Pradesh, among the rituals, signs and symbols of the Gond and Bhil tribals, near the colourful village market and under the brilliant sun of central India. His tutor had drawn a black dot, the bindu, on the wall of his room to help him concentrate. All this left a lasting imprint on his young and fertile imagination, surfacing much later in the Seventies in Paris. Then, his childhood memories resulted in an entirely new “plastic creation”. Based on the elemental form of the powerful sun, the black bindu, set amid the brilliant colours associated with early Jain and Rajput miniatures, expresses the pulsating, primal energy of the universe. The artist uses the circle, triangle, square and diagonal line metaphorically to represent the mountains, forests, ravines and rivers of his homeland. Denying any influence of tantric art in his works, Raza says his paintings should be viewed first in the context of “pure plastic order” and “form order” and, second, in terms of his deep involvement with nature. The artist tries to bring these elements together to create “a coherent pictorial logic” to express the cosmic forces that are the source of all life.

Chamatkara
acrylic on canvas
100cm x 100cm | 39.4" x 39.4"
1996 | from private collection

Ravinder G. Reddy 1956–current
The underlying theme in Ravinder G. Reddy’s work is the position of people who hold subordinate status in society. In most scenarios the repressed are supposed to be silent, but in Reddy’s works their wide-eyed frontal stare actually communicates power. Reddy’s forms reflect influences of Indian temple sculptures, the elaborately coiffured heads being those of women (in themselves treated as a subservient social group). The female heads are marked by their large and solid features with a heraldic and mesmerizing stare. Reddy’s women are proud, dignified but never silent; they are living heads pulsating with confidence.

Portrait of a Woman
painted, gilded, polyester resin fibreglass
84cm x 88cm x 113cm | 33" x 34.5" x 44.5"
1999 | Con No. 2477

Jamini Roy 1887–1972
Jamini Roy was the first Indian artist to consciously model his work entirely on folk art. His inventive style was very different from the delicate art of the Bengal Revivalist School. Derived from the Kalighat pat, it consisted of sweeping brush strokes and a lively depiction of religious and social motifs. His figures filled the page and tended to be compressed into the frame. During his “folk art” phase, Jamini Roy’s compositions were more complex and crowded and he used a wide range of bright, opaque powder colours. He also made art accessible to the general public and not just the preserve of the affluent few. In India “folk art” was rediscovered in Bengal and began to be collected by prominent families and other connoisseurs from the early twentieth century. Further, Roy’s search to find an authentic individuality (at a time when the country was still under foreign rule) has been seen by some to metaphorically merge with India’s Independence movement.

Seated Woman
gouache on canvas
51cm x 28.5cm | 20" x 11.25"
undated | from private collection