Jagdish Swaminathan (1929-1994)

Jagdish Swaminathan was a writer, political activist and painter who began to make an impact on the Indian stage after Independence. Like Gaitonde he searched for a personal means of expression that depicted the reality of the manifest world around him in a new way.  This work rejects the mannerism of modern European art and the romanticism of the Bengal tradition and instead draws inspiration from the folk and tribal art of India.  These traditions represent the natural world in symbolic abstracted forms that hint at a ritual significance and are reminiscent of Neolithic cave paintings found throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Underlying this series is the artist’s spirituality and respect for nature as the guide to a deeply mystifying universe whose potential remains unrealised and hidden. The paintings themselves thus appear to be pictorial maps designed to help his audience to view the world around them in new ways.  

'Rejecting the conventions of Western Naturalism, for an art which struggled to "probe the relation of color to space," Swaminathan began work on a series called Time and Space.  This series, utilizing the iconography of the bird, the mountain the tree, the reflection, the shadow, embraces the metaphorical quality of the surrealists while preserving the formal qualities of Indian miniatures.' (J. Swaminathan, 'The Cygan, An Auto-bio Note,' Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 11).