Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

35* Avinash Chandra (1931 – 1991) Three Wheels Watercolour and pen and ink on paper, 1960 S/d ‘Avinash 60’ l.l. 13.8 x 24.8 in (35.0 x 63.0 cm) Provenance Acquired from Bonham’s London, April 2005 Islamic And Indian Art Sale by Osian’s - Connoisseurs of Art. INR 400,000 – 600,000 USD 6,250 – 9,375 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 unselfconsciously 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 in1956, where, starting in1958,heexperiencedafewyears of unbridled creative inspiration. The 1961 work here comes from this phase of untrammelled 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 , Olton Gallery, London, Exec, 1960. Indian Modern Fine Arts | 87