Badri Nath Arya

Born in Peshawar in 1936, Badri Nath Arya settled in Lucknow with his family after Partition. Showing no inclination towards the family business, Arya instead developed an interest in art and photography, leading him to study at the Lucknow College of Arts and Crafts. His work is profoundly influenced by the Bengal School of Art, skillfully using the watercolour and wash techniques that figures such as Abanindranath Tagore and Asit Kumar Haldar employed. Arya’s work draws on Indian culture, customs and myths, often depicting rural life and figures from Hindu mythology.

Gharonde, ‘houses’ in Hindi, is a whimsical landscape in warm yellow hues, a unique painting in Arya’s oeuvre that varies from his figurative work. Curving paths and staircases interweave with playful, circular portals to create an eccentric composition, recalling the Surrealist movement of the mid-twentieth century. A master of his medium, watercolour and wash adds a matte quality that yields extraordinary interactions between light and shadow in this imagined world. Arya gathers light and house elements in the centre of the painting, adding shadow and stretching the landscape from the focal point. Occupying the entire space of the composition, Gharonde is an example of Arya’s atmospheric work rendered in an innovative, panoramic formation.