Jehangir Sabavala

Mumbai, National Gallery of Modern Art, Jehangir Sabavala: A Retrospective, 9 November - 4 December 2005

New Delhi, National Gallery of Modern Art, Jehangir Sabavala: A Retrospective,           20 December 2005 - 19 January 2006

R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting, The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Bombay, 2005, p. 199 illus.

in good condition, minor surface dirt, as viewed
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Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre was unlike that of any other Indian artist practising during the Modernist era. He developed his own unique visual vocabulary that evolved from his training at Mumbai's Sir J. J. School of Art, the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London, the Academie André Lhôte, the Académie Julianand the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris. He then returned to India in the late 1950s and combined his formal technical skills with inspiration drawn from Indian culture to produce an awe-inspiring body of works.

Over the decades, there were notable shifts in the style and subject matter of Sabavala’s paintings. From the figurative works of the 1950s to the semi-Cubist abstractions of the 1960s and the focus on spaciousness during the 1970s, Sabavala’s paintings then began to emphasize the drama and magnificence of nature, focussing on the luminosity of colour, the varied effects of multiple tones and the rendering of spatial dimensions through the gradation of light. The sky and the sea also begin to dominate the subject matter of Sabavala’s canvases, as in the case of Lunar Alchemy.

Ranjit Hoskote describes this shift in his idiom by noting that in his later works, Sabavala is '...revelling in the pyrotechnics of the rising and setting sun, in the relaxed vocabulary of stippling and striation, construing an imagery of stars, sails, and nested figures into hymns to various times of day and night, marking aubade and nocturne. The cycle of day and night exercises him. [...] This cluster of works refers back to themes that Sabavala had addressed before, but in each case, the treatment is strikingly novel. Very unusually for him, Sabavala reveals the machinery of his composition, makes it the real subject of these works: the painting is demonstrated as the result of heaped bands or stacked panels, formats drawn from tradition; or else, the artist borrows the architect's device of the exploded view, and the photographic techniques of the close-up and the aerial view, to re-define, not only his subjects, but also his form.' (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting, The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Bombay, 2005, p. 186-187.)

These words neatly sum up the essence of this painting. The vibrant hues of cyan and azure are masterfully combined so that the land and sky occupy separate planes and present an 'exploded view'. Painted in 2003, this work embodies the artist's characteristic visionary, ethereal landscapes.