‘Especially because the Metascapes have remained a focal subject for the artist throughout the rest of his career, the prologue narrative told by the 1960s landscape paintings is revelatory.’
Painted in 1963, when Akbar Padamsee was in New York on a John D. Rockefeller III grant, this architectural landscape displays brilliant artistic economy. Padamsee's landscapes have long been considered among his greatest accomplishments, and the current lot is an early precursor to the first 'Metascapes' that began to appear in his work in 1970. This striking and minimalist composition reflects both Padamsee’s mastery of geometric forms and his exceptional understanding of color relationships, characteristic of what is arguably his best period.
‘He builds each landscape slowly, brick by brick, almost as if it were a building, always intent on the rhythm inherent in the point counter-point of planes... It is always the composition of planes and colours which give form to what Padamsee has to say.’
After acquiring the painting in New York in the 1960s, Rasil Basu described the work in a letter to her brother, Patwant Singh:
Image courtesy: Amrita and Rekha Basu
‘Did I tell you, we bought a Padamsee. It’s two houses – abstracted on [the] left hand side of the painting, up the middle – with large empty spaces in a beautiful red, black, brown colour.’
The houses and the large, flat expanse of space beside them, are rendered in bold, yet earthy tones. The sumptuous color palette and thick impasto furnish the work with a compelling intensity, and yet throughout the canvas the viewer can feel the profound control that the artist has exerted over his medium. This captivating landscape exhibits the distinctive unearthly quality of Padamsee’s compositions. The painter himself proclaimed:
“The subject matter is chosen to give you the possibility of using color, but it shouldn’t be a normal landscape. There must be something uncanny there. Unless some disquieting feeling is there I would reject it.”
