Akbar Padamsee (b. 1928)

Good overall condition. The browns are more reddish in the original.
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Akbar Padamsee's iconic heads are a fascinating marker of the development of his visual language and creative process. His early works were characterized by a strict formality and angularity of line that seemed to create a deliberate space between subject and viewer. Gradually this line became more fluid and graceful imparting a softer, more humane touch to his figures. The artist's subsequent experiments with color and space led to the creation of his metascapes which in turn informed the style of his later figural paintings.

Padamsee's later figures combine a soft, limpid line with flat planes of color or sepia tones that are skillfully used to impart an almost transcendent texture to the surface of the canvas. The artist uses residual spaces to heightened effect in exploring form. In fact, as Yashodhara Dalmia explains, the forms almost seem to emerge of their own accord from a 'collision of the assemblage of strokes.' (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 215).   As the artist further states, "While working with sepia I discover a distinct change in the emerging forms. I find myself largely using the arm stroke, less of the finger, wrist and forearm stroke. Soon the oil-bar is replaced by a cloth rag, brush and oil paint - but the working method remains the same." (Akbar Padamsee, The Tertiaries: Oils on Canvas, Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, Mumbai).

The defining quality of Padamsee's works, though, is a sense of vulnerability and loneliness. With their pensive, introspective expressions, the faces of the couple in this painting are imbued with an ineffable sadness, seemingly echoing not just personal anguish but the very nature of human existence. The artist expresses his absorption with this solitary state when he says that, "expression is all the more powerful when it is about a solitary figure or just a face." (Akbar Padamsee in conversation with A. K. Datta, 1992).