Akbar Padamsee (1928 – 2020), was an Indian artist and painter, considered one of the pioneers in modern India. He was a first generation postcolonial artist that sought cosmopolitan freedom in Paris and London. A graduate from the Sir J J School of Arts in 1951, with a Diploma in Painting, he went to live and work in France. He exhibited with the Progressive Artists’ Group, a group that reacted against both Western classicism and folk-art revival to establish modern and personal styles. In 1952, he held his first solo show in Paris, at Galerie Saint Placide and was awarded a prize by Andre Breton on behalf of the Journale d’Art. Padamsee’s first solo show, in India, was held in Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai in 1954.

An eminent artist, his career has been an exploration of a few chosen genres- prophets, heads, couples, still-life, grey scale works, metascapes, mirror images and tertiaries, across a multitude of media – oil painting, plastic emulsion, watercolour, sculpture, printmaking, computer graphics, and photography. His early portraits and landscapes in varied mediums of painting, drawing, and etching demonstrate a quasi-spiritual style of working. His oils have been characterised by a deep bold intensity and luminescence while his drawings, by contrast, a calmness.

Though Padamsee’s early works were all about using a colourful palette, between 1959 – 1960 he chose to forgo colours and paint in grey tones stating, “Grey is without prejudice; it does not discriminate between object and space”. Since the seventies, his work has alternated between two major genres, luminous metascapes – his signature works, and the human figure. His command over any of his chosen art forms is evident, even in his recent addition of computer graphics. Some of the best works that he is known for are his Grey Series, Metascapes, and Mirror Images.

Akbar Padamsee, being a modernist and experimentalist artist used subjects as informants of form, rather than an interest in the portrayal of the subject beyond the study of lines. Padamsee’s portraits and nudes are monochromes of grisaille, sepia and ink black tones that are portrayals of imagined people.  Though he had Arai Kesava Naidu, a lady who came to the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay from Tamil Nadu as his muse, he preferred to obscure the relationship between the portrayal of human form and his work.  This means that as a true modernist painter he saw these works as attempts to practice form and his pursuit of lines through portrayals of humans. Padamsee’s fabled landscapes ‘Metascapes’  that he achieves in oil and canvas share the composition with his nudes and portraits.

The works at art&soul, were curated into the collection of the gallery to demonstrate that slant and use of space on the paper. Sublime elements seek a melange between Post War modernist aesthetics and an application of ink and tempera on paper that is influenced from Chinese landscapes. These works bought directly from the artist form part of a suite of watercolours and drawings that encompass his practice in this medium and form, with a clear representative quality of the aesthetic.