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

85 38 Akbar Padamsee (b.1928) Metascape (Diptych) Oil on canvas, 1995 S/d in English ‘Padamsee 95’ t.l. 54.0 x 72.4 in (137.4 x 183.7 cm) Provenance Private Collection, Mumbai INR 16,000,000 – 20,000,000 USD 333,330 – 416,670 “Anything that is worth contemplating is possessed of a solitude and indeed Akbar’s landscapes are immensely solitary. Girgio de Chirico, an artist whom Akbar has always admired, speaks of two kinds of solitude in works of art: “plastic solitude” which is the contemplative beatitude offered to us by the artist’s genius of construction or formal combination; and “metaphysical solitude” in which the artist, presumably treating space as an extended field of his unconscious, projects signs into the infinite and invests it with meaning. In the sense that Akbar regards nature as an objective phenomenon and so restructures it as to give it an aesthetic form – a contemplative beatitude – his genius lies in achieving plastic solitude. The notion of metaphysical solitude in the above sense does not apply to him though he has by a curious coincidence chosen to call his recent landscapes ‘metascapes’” – Geeta Kapur, rpt. in Contemporary Indian Artists , Vikash Publishing, 1978, p106.