Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts | October 2018

93 Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts Akbar Padamsee b. 12 April 1928 Untitled Oil on canvas, 1963 47.0 x 35.0 in (119.5 x 89.0 cm) S/d ‘Padamsee 63’ t.l. ` 6,000,000 – 9,000,000 $ 83,330 – 125,000 Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Akbar Padamsee in the year 1963 by a Mumbai-based art Collector. This Lot will be accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity from the artist. 38 The landscapes he painted during his later, grey phase were in contrast panoramic: wide, sweeping views of tropical cities. They carried over the compact structure of geometric forms from the previous landscapes and projected them on to a larger scale. The later landscapes, beginning around 1963, became different. Akbar was slowly finding an equilibrium in his relation to nature, somewhere between an idealised image, a realistic image, and the desired image of a romantic. Anything that is worth contemplating is possessed of a solitude and indeed Akbar’s landscapes are immensely solitary. Giorgio 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. Contemporary Indian Artists. New Delhi: Vikas 1978. p.106 Detailed Artist Biography osianama.com/artists/ akbar-padamsee