Osian's Auction Catalogue Select Masterpieces of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | June 2009

113 52 Sadequain (1930 – 1987) Alim-e-rang-o-bu (Master of Colour & Fragrance) Oil on canvas, 1972 S/d in Nashk ‘Sadequain 72’ l.l. Inscribed ‘Alim-e-rang-o-bu’ (Master of colour and fragrance) c.l. 52.7 x 38.6 in (134.0 x 98.0 cm) Condition Restoration carried out in 2008 by the Osian’s Conservation Department headed by Sanjay Dhar INR 2,400,000 – 3,000,000 USD 50,000 – 62,500 Lot 52 work titled ‘Alim ranga o bu’ depicts the creator of colour and fragrance, implying the artist as well as the creator of the cosmos. Sadequain’s images are enactments of an existential drama, a macabre, wherein the desire to be One is willfully suspended. The body is cut into two - be it lovers, artist and his model, or the artist himself. The transcendental is facilitated through this suspension, with forebodings of being doomed. He indulged in the modern Freudian notions of the divisive self (mostly using his own image), and constructed cellular narratives of an artist, an artist’s role, ‘the creator’ but fashions it in his individualistic and daring style. Man and his existential self become his loci. His works can be divided thematically into three main categories – firstly, dealing with the dark and ugly aspects of the self which are sadomasochistic, and secondly Man amidst the cosmic or “the given/ the dictated” order of the environment, struggling with the narrations of mythologies of mankind, and thirdly his calligraphic works. The first two intermingle in subtle ways. Sadequain’s obsession with the self is not narcissist in the Greek mythological sense but somewhat like Dante’s medieval epic work Divine Comedy – the author’s journeys of the three realms of the dead – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – with a living body. Sadequain’s visual vocabulary is full of personal symbols such as pen, brush, ink-pot, cactus, mirror and vases.