Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

48 THE PASSIONATE DETACHMENT 6 AMBADAS (b.1922) Untitled S/d in English, l.l. Oil on canvas, 1971 152.3 x 91.6 cm. (60.0 x 36.1”) Rs. 150,000 - 200,000 $ 3,190 - 4,255 “Ambadas’ canvases exhibit the transparency of his strokes. You can see all the details of almost all the strokes of his brush. Normally there is more than one direction of the flow of the strokes: vertical, horizontal, oblique and innumerable combination of these three. The colours on the canvas flow in various strokes in diverse directions, yet do not fall apart from one another, and this feature is very similar to the taan s of alaap in classical music, they do not attempt a harmony on the canvas. Rather, the harmony in these canvases does not become meaningful through its opposition to disharmony. This is a harmony of being. Being itself, every individual stroke creates two shores between which it generates a luminous space for itself in which to flow almost quietly and wordlessly. Wordlessly because these strokes are not an attempt to build anything nameable”. (Udyan Vajpeyi from Ambadas and the Unnamable Other , in Art Heritage 11, 1991-92 , pp 45-46).