Osian's Auction Catalogue The Masterpieces Series | March 2010

64 33 A vinAsh c hAndrA (1931 – 1991) Fun & Games Oil on canvas, 1961 Signed in English ‘Avinash’ l.l. 36.0 x 71.8 in (91.5 x 182.2 cm) Provenance THE OSIAN’s COLLECTION. INR 2,400,000 – 3,600,000 US$ 50,000 – 75,000 “Mine was an upbringing that taught me to think in straight lines but, perversely, I had to think in circles… as I painted, I found shapes thrusting upwards like plants or mushrooms, shapes that virtually exploded into life. This convulsive element stimulated and excited me, and more drawings and paintings magically materialised” – Avinash Chandra, Avinash Chandra , Rose Fried Gallery, October 22 - November 20, 1968. Avinash Chandra: Shapes Exploding Into Life Avinash Chandra was among a group of Indian artists (others were Mohan Samant and Laxman Pai), who spent a significant length of time abroad in the early 1960s relating unself-consciously to modernism, at the end of over a decade in which artists like Raza, Gaitonde and Ambadas had forged varying relationships with modernism and abstraction. Avinash Chandra was very successful in India before the age of 25 – a solo show with the Progressive Artists Group and a top prize in the first National Exhibition of Indian Art at the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1955. He moved to England in 1956, where, starting in 1958, he experienced a few years of unbridled creative inspiration. The 1961 work here comes from this phase of untrammeled creativity, which saw Chandra gain impressive accolades – international exhibitions, New York gallery representation, a presence in many private and public collections and a BBC documentary as early as 1963. A connoisseur of Indian art at the time wrote: “In Chandra’s case, the pattern of a particular painting evolved in much the way a doodle evolves, or the way in which colours are used to distinguish elements from one another. By trial and intuition – and with a very spontaneous hand – there evolves a web of colour and line which welds together the ambiguity of his images. Although one might at first interpret this patterning as a self-conscious attempt to slur over the conventional distinctions implicit in Western painting between figuration and non-figuration… [for the Indian painter] the ‘play’ of the pattern comes first; there is never any particular consciousness of geometry, and never any attempt to exclude an image for the sake of ‘pure’ pictorial values” - G. M. Butcher rpt. in Avinash Chandra, Molton Gallery, London, ExC, 1960. An Indian critic wrote: “Characteristics of line, erotic imagery and textural interest are present to such an obvious unsecretive degree that one is engulfed by the sensuousness and erotica into an unquestioning belief in the painter’s absolute honesty” B. James, “A Passage from India - Seven Painters in London”, LKC 9 , New Delhi, 1968, p.27). Exhibited and illustrated Revisualising India. Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi, 2005. Illustrated in catalogue published by Osian’s – Connoisseurs of Art, p.69