This interview was recorded when
Akbar Padamsee came to
Chandigarh for an audio visual lecture at the invitation of Chandigarh
Lalit Kala Akademi.
Akbar Padamsee was born in
Mumbai in 1928. He received his art education from Sir
J. J. School of Art in Mumbai at the time when the
Progressive Artists' Group announced itself on the
Indian art scene in
1947. Padamsee went to live and work in
France in
1951. In
1952, he was awarded a prize by
Andre Breton, known as the pope of surrealism, on behalf of the Journale d'art. His very first solo show was held in
Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai in
1954. Though widely spoken of as a modernist, Padamsee continues to resist easy categorization. Throughout his illustrious career spanning six decades, he has remained fiercely experimental and individualistic. Renouncing the rich colour palette of his early years, he chose to paint in grey between the years 1959-1960 stating, "
Grey is without prejudice; it does not discriminate between object and space". Akbar Padamsee's artistic oeuvre is a formal exploration of a few chosen genres- prophets, heads, couples, still-life, grey works, metascapes, mirror - images and tertiaries , across a multitude of media -- oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, computer graphics, and photography. In 1962, Padamsee was awarded a gold medal from the Lalit Kala Akademi, and in
1965 a fellowship from the
J. D. Rockefeller Foundation. Subsequently he was invited to be an artist-in-residence by
Stout State University,
Wisconsin. In 1967 a solo exhibition of his paintings was held at the
Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art,
Canada, after which he returned to
India. In 1969-71, with the
Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship funds he set up inter-art
Vision Exchange Workshop (
VIEW), where artists and filmmakers could freely experiment across various disciplines and practices which is remembered to this day as a landmark initiative. Padamsee himself made two short abstract films -
Syzygy and Events in a
Cloud Chamber, where he animated a set of geometric drawings. Since the seventies, his work is seen to alternate between two major genres: luminous metascapes - his signature works, and the human figure which he continues to imbue with an arresting presence. He has a deep and abiding interest in Sanskrit texts, a glimpse of which finds resonance in his statement on sun-moon metascapes of the mid seventies. In an interview Padamsee says "in the introductory stanzas of
Kalidasa's Abhijnanashakuntalam he describes the sun and the moon as the controllers on time -- 'ye dve kal vighattah', and water as a source of all seeds -- "sarva beej prakriti". I would never have thought of painting the sun and the moon together if it were not for this. I felt I could use the elements -- water, earth, sky -- without referring to any particular landscape -- a metaphysical landscape". He has participated in exhibitions and Biennales --
Venice,
1953 and
1955;
Sao Paulo and
Tokyo in
1959;
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1981;
Royal Academy of Arts, London 1982 and
National des Arts Plastiques,
Paris,
1985. In
1980, a retrospective of his work was organized by the
Art Heritage Gallery, in Mumbai and
New Delhi. Akbar Padamsee was awarded the prestigious
Kalidas Samman by the
Government of Madhya Pradesh in
1997. Other awards include the Lalit
Kala Ratna
Puraskar in 2004, the
Dayawati Modi Award in
2007, ''Roopdhar" award by
Bombay Art Society - 2008 and
Kailash Lalit Kala award in
2010. He was awarded the Padama Bhushan by the
Government of india in 2010. Akbar Padamsee lives and works in
Mumbai, India.
www.lalitkalachandigarh.com chandigarhlka@gmail.com
- published: 07 Jun 2013
- views: 1296