Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001)

Ashta Nayak: Eight Pioneers of Indian Art, Gallery ArtsIndia, New York, March 31–April 29, 2005 and Gallery ArtsIndia, Palo Alto, May 20–June 19, 2005

India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey, April 7–July 31, 2002

Jeffrey Wechsler and Umesh Gaur, ed., India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Rutgers, 2002, pl. 27, p. 49

Good overall condition. Small areas of paper loss along bottom edge, stable.
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The current work from the 1960s, Untitled (Black), was exhibited at the groundbreaking survey of Indian art at Rutgers University, India: Contemporary Art from Northeast Private Collections in 2002, as well as in the Gallery ArtsIndia (now Aicon Gallery) landmark exhibition Ashta Nayakin 2005 in New York, London and Palo Alto, featuring work by eight of the members of the now infamous Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG): MF Husain, FN Souza, SH Raza, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee and Jagdish Swaminathan.

The most reclusive member of the PAG, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde was a solitary figure who preferred isolation from everything he considered irrelevant to his identity as a painter. Deeply influenced by Zen Buddhist philosophy, Gaitonde engendered a meditative approach to his work, which he carried over into all aspects of his private life.

After visiting New York in 1964, where he was exposed to post-war art and the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Gaitonde began to use a roller and palette knife instead of a paint brush. His paintings are constructed with layers of color, each layer forming a balanced, ethereal relationship between light and texture. The transparency and delicate layering delivered through the use of a roller is apparent in the current work, delicately created in oil wash, creating a sense of luminosity, texture and depth which would not be possible with a brush or palette knife.  

In his later years, Gaitonde was concerned not with representation but with the painted surface itself. Gaitonde never considered himself an abstract painter, stating that there is no such thing as an abstract painting, instead referring to his work as ‘non-objective’.

In the artist’s own words: “A painting is simply a painting—a play of light and color. Every painting has a seed which germinates into the next painting. A painting is not limited to one canvas—I go on adding elements and that’s how my work evolves. There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas, and the metamorphosis never ends,” (Menezes, The Meditative Brushstroke, ArtIndia, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 1998, Mumbai, p. 69).