Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Antiquities Modern Contemporary Fine Arts and Books | April 2017

55 Rabin Mondal b.1929 Untitled Oil on canvas, 1963 Signed in English ‘Rabin’ c.l Inscribed in English ‘Rabin (RABIN MONDAL) 1963; Size 142 x 105cm, Oil’ on verso 41.3 x 56.1 in (105.0 x 142.5 cm) Provenance Private Mumbai-based Collector; previously acquired directly from the artist by Delhi Art Gallery INR 800,000 – 1,200,000 USD 11,940 – 17,910 Full double-spread image on pp.118-119 Reprinted as Full Colour double-spread Image in Santo Datta. After The Fall: Time, Life & Art of Rabin Mondal. New Delhi: DAG 2005; pp.129-130. Wrongly dated & sized in the publication as ‘1990’ instead of ‘1963’. “The reason why some people are not too enthusiastic about him is that his paintings are shorn of all traces of excessive sweetness. There is a starkness about his pictorial statements. That, again, is precisely the reason why others like them… Most of Rabin Mondal’s works contain a great deal of passion – the passion that is embodied in deep sorrow. Pathos and tragedy are not overtly described. In many cases, not even mentioned. But a whispered statement can, more often than not, be more telling than a shout… Mondal’s art bears testimony to the fact that he has a fine sense of design as overall visual structure. The organization, in his paintings, of elements like shape, line, tone, colour and texture combine with the forces of space and movement to produce final statements in which every part is as necessary as another, as vital to the whole as the components of a machine. His pictorial architecture therefore gives the viewer a feeling of completeness.” – Arany Banerjee, rpt. in Rabin Mondal : BAAC ExC.1984. ‘Roughly in the sixties and seventies of the last century, Rabin experimented purely with the pictorial aesthetics of colours and the variable texture of pigments on varied surfaces. In his paintings, the structural mystique of the Cubo-Futuristic formation of figures in space does not concede an illusion of ‘depth’ on the flat surface. A modernist thrust towards reduction of realistic details and a desire to create a dynamic totality of design are evident in many of his paintings and drawings of this period.’ – Santo Datta rpt. in After The Fall: Time, Life & Art of Rabin Mondal . DAG 2005; p170. 120 | Osian’s–Connoisseurs of Art