Akbar Padamsee (b. 1928)

In 1994, Padamsee began painting a series titled Mirror-Images. These are conceptual landscapes that combine an image with its dialectical opposite in a monumental diptych, where each panel represents an inverted, relative version of the other. As with his earlier Metascapes Padamsee draws inspiration from the basic elements of nature;  earth, water, fire and air.

'Space-cognition and time-cognition depend on a compound duality, inside-outside, expansion-contraction, exhalation-inhalation, the round and the square. We inhale, the trees exhale, we exhale, the trees inhale, a mirrored symbiosis. Expression must contain its dialectical opposite, the conscious and the unconscious on the same psychic plane. I have two eyes, two retinas, but the mind compounds the two images into one. When I make mirror images, they remain two, but a fusion compounds them into one, as the starting point of visual experience. Colors expand and contract, colors travel on the surface of the static painting. Colors reach out of their skins to invade each others territories, the blue goes in search of its complimentary counterpart yellow or orange.' (Akbar Padamsee, Mirror-Images, Pundole Art Gallery, 1994).

'These works bring together the artist's philosophical interests with his formal interests in color...  Dualities seem to define the career of Akbar Padamsee; an Indian who uses European forms, a colorist who paints monochrome works, who uses oil as much as he relies on ink and deploys both line and stain, a figurative painter who paints sublime landscapes, and an artist who is intuitive as he is intellectual.'  (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005,  p. 60).