Prabhakar Barwe

Christie's New York, 17 September 2003, lot 191

The surface of the canvas is undulated along the upper and lower edges. The work would benefit from being re-stretched. In good condition overall.
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In the mid to late 1950s, the Pop Art movement began to gain ground in England and the United States. It challenged the traditions of earlier, more ‘academic’ movements by portraying popular culture and iconography. Banal objects were removed from their everyday context and featured prominently in these works, thereby elevating their status. In the 1970s Prabhakar Barwe adopted this practice and also began to paint mundane, seemingly unrelated and innocuous objects that seem to float in space, but on a more intimate scale. He often juxtaposes objects in newer and surprising contexts that allow the viewer to respond to them in different ways.  

"He defined a parrallel universe through the gleeful transgression of customary logic, assembled a symbolic reality where the data of ordinary life was transmitted as strange and sublime missives." (Ranjit Hoskote, 'The Secret Heart of the Clock', ART India Magazine, Mumbai, April - June 1996, p. 44.)

During this time, Barwe's thematic and stylistic preoccupations also underwent a change. “Newly interested in space as a metaphysical concept, he began striving for a purity of form and colour. The fluid relationship between an object, an idea, and its translation into an image became a ‘meta-level’ concern. The works began to take on a gentle lyricism, reflected in titles like Orange Prayer or Cloud Fish. He also began using a house painter's brand of synthetic glossy enamel paint - when diluted in turpentine and kerosene, it achieves a delicacy akin to watercolour.  His brushwork became practically invisible, and strong colour gave way to muted shades. Despite this new austerity of palette, images of this period have a rare luminosity. […] Isolated heads, pendulum clocks, and staircases recur in his works. Colour was gradually drained out of the canvas, forms often reduced to mere shadows, imprints, outlines. Nevertheless, he continued to use diverse elements, holding them together on a single canvas in graceful balance. The artist's mature works correspond to his disposition - they are quiet, self-effacing and almost monastic.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, pp. 14-15).