Sharmila makes paintings to be reckoned with. Her largely abstract canvases and wild seaside landscapes can be broody, even confrontational, in earthy dark tones.

 At first glance, the bold patterns in Sharmila Gupta’s recent paintings and drawings appear to mark a change in direction from the large gritty paintings of tidal pools that were her last body of work. On further viewing, it becomes apparent that her familiar landscapes have become compressed into signs or ideograms. These perhaps reflect time spent in walks in the woods during the lockdown when she made a study of aboriginal bark as well as the abstract lineage of modernism. Sharmila’s new paintings light up the exhibition space. She moves easily between representational and abstract imagery, and she mixes seemingly contradictory inclinations. For example, her process is messy and engaged, but her compositions are deliberate and playful; her work shifts suddenly from somber to slapstick; she has a sincere belief in painting’s transcendent power.

Artist: Sharmila Gupta

The intimate, explorative body of work exposes her complex interaction with a particular place and it’s shifting transient nature. Sharmila has often spoken about rejecting the picturesque in favor of primordial nature as represented. She has found these necessary elemental motifs. At the edge of water and land, she has become immersed in the visceral experience of light, space and motion. There she has sought to bridge the atmospheric, volumetric world of matter and its equivalence in signs. Landscape thus becomes an arena not only to view the fleeting nature of the elements with its seasonal and biological cycles but also a vessel for thought and process within the context of various pictorial languages.

Sharmila makes paintings to be reckoned with. Her largely abstract canvases and wild seaside landscapes can be broody, even confrontational, in earthy dark tones. But many of these paintings sparkle with brilliant blues, and cheery greens, reds, and yellows. Darker colors crop up and provide terrific contrast. Sharmila completed her part-time course in painting from Sir J J School of Art and since then she has continually challenged herself, grappling with form in oils water-colours and collages; with space and surface in abstract painting and art history. One thing has remained constant her delight in the elemental quality of paint. She’s like a kid with finger paints, or making mud pies. She fills her canvases with smears, dollops, and grit. Her passion can’t be missed.

In her current suite of works some of her former complex spatial panoramas with their diverse vantage points and horizon lines remain. Sharmila, however, has often changed her viewing perspective. At times, she has vicariously crawled along the surface of the earth or seen things as a fish traversing water or as a bird from above or a combination of different vantage points in the same painting, a vertical panoramic space is grounded by two trees uniting land, fire, water and sky seen both from above and at the horizon. By contrast, Sharmila Gupta reveals a flatter, condensed spatial world of water patterns containing floating interactive shapes. Viewed from above, a brown form hovers over incoming and outgoing tides acting as a magnifying glass revealing particles of pollution. This pivotal form compresses the action of nature and shield shapes reminiscent of the mapping of water trails found in aboriginal painting.

Sign language becomes even more evident in small watercolor drawings that evoke musical exercises with their motifs and recapitulations of the ebb and flow of tides: times of day amidst floating objects pulled by currents. Sharmila has stated that all her abbreviations of shapes and forms come from acute observation of particular sites. Her drawings reflect these observations of a sea world with undulating patterns, horizontal and vertical lines that act as cross currents creating pulsating tensions. Sharmila subverts our expectations of space. Despite the horizon line, we appear to have a bird’s-eye view. The piece’s crackling rhythm, intoxicating tones, and the artist’s loose, playful hand make the works a joyful exclamation. These dense, expansive little nature-scapes gleam like gemstones.

Sharmila’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout her long career she has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Abstract Expressionism. Over the past decades she has been moving back and forth between both pictorial concepts, sometimes emphasizing her love of light and expressive painterly forms, other times using abbreviated signs, and sometimes managing to simultaneously employ both modes. In her painting series, she combined ideograms, patterns that interact with volumetric shapes and atmospheric moods. The exhibition shows a good introduction to her innovative merging of the physical tactile world with a formal language of signs, ideograms and pictographs, expanding the painter’s language in this time.  

Abhijeet Gondkar

January 2022, Mumbai

Artist's Statements...

Myself, Sharmila Gupta, an abstract painter. My artwork includes oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas and paper. 

Passionate about painting I create whatever I perceive after observing the environment around me. I interprete the cosmos of colour and form through my visualisation to express them uniquely.

Perseverance and expedition has shifted the quality of my works and opened a new realm off possibilities and offered me with a different context of painting and my relationship to it's process.

Sharmila Gupta.

Artist

From: 31st January to 6th February 2022

"Forms of Musing"

An Exhibition of Paintings

By artist Sharmila Gupta

VENUE:Jehangir Art Gallery

161-B, M.G. Road Kala Ghoda, Mumbai – 400 001Timing: 11am to 7pm

Re-visiting Mehlli

“I believe that in painting, everything should come out of a complete need. Color should only be used when totally necessary.”

Mehlli Gobhai
Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

Mehlli Gobhai, born in Mumbai in 1931, completed his undergraduate education at St. Xavier's College. He then trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art in London, and the Art Students League and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. For twenty years after his studies, he lived and worked out of New York. His first major show titled Marking Black was exhibited at the Bronx Museum, where he showed 5 canvases alongside artists like Richard Serra, Sean Scully and Larry Bell. Gobhai returned to Mumbai in the late 1980s.

Untitled-14,mixed media on paper, 51.5 x 66 inches, 2010
Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

In his studio, in Mumbai, are found objects from his farm in Gholvad, dried coconuts to dolphin skull. “In my work, like nature, there is a compulsion towards the ‘axis mundi’. It is like the spinal cord – something derived from nature. The human body is an architectural feat. Through my anatomy study and my work, it has brought me the closest I have come to a sense of truth and a grand design.” says Gobhai whilst describing his work, using the term ‘organic geometry’, for its shimmering vibrancy. “The sense of aging and transformation of an organic form, and morphing it into something new appeals to me.” Even across a room, Gobhai’s geometric abstractions seem to emit a sub-audible hum. Their energy is so high that their physical boundaries appear permeable; they easily charge a space substantially larger than the four constructed canvases that they are painted on and the fourteen works on paper that completely fill the large rooms of Chemould Prescott Road.

As with most abstract painting, it may be fairly easy to describe what the paintings look like – repetitive geometric patterns rendered in an essentially earth-toned palette – yet nearly impossible to describe the aesthetic of their visceral impact. What exactly does a radiating starburst or proto hound-tooth pattern mean anyway? No matter the intricacy, how does one discuss a painting of a shape?

Untitled-2 mixed media on constructed canvas, 60 x 60 inches, 2010

Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

In looking for a conceptual foothold, where no overt narrative presents itself, how natural, how tempting to contemplate the physical origin of the artworks. Indeed, close inspection of Gobhai’s paintings makes for an intriguing exploration. Gobhai’s abstractions are not intentionally obfuscated nor are they apparent descriptive imperative. Absent, more overt rational as these, there might be a reasonable and strong inclination on the viewer’s part to assume that Gobhai’s painting exits solely as an outlet for his need to apply paint in the most painstaking way possible. It is at this point; one might begin to wonder if the artist is engaged in obsessive-compulsive behavior that, only incidentally, results in an artwork. No doubt that for the layman, Gobhai’s process must seem physically redundant and numbingly time consuming; for most people it is close to impossible to imagine sitting down and laying application, removal and addition of layers of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, zinc, aluminum powder and pastel one after the other, that add up to make a single painting.  

Although, it might be tempting to deconstruct Gobhai’s process and even, on a certain level, gain insights into the work by doing so, it is imperative not to lose sight of the seductiveness of the object itself. If we become obsessed with the process over the impact, then it is easy to be overwhelmed by the marks without keeping a fix as Gobhai does on their functionality. With attention to the intricacies of material, construction and placement, Mehlli Gobhai’s constructed canvases form an intriguing symbolic system. Gobhai mixes monochromatic and minimal styles with expressive use of color and form. His work is permeated by a powerful sense of the uncanny; he infuses textures and images with a dramatic, atmospheric charge.

Evoking a magical and emotive experience of time, place, and action, Gobhai both romances and unsettles the viewer with a sense of both revelation and mystery. He arranges elements in ways that privilege texture and tactility. With a theatrical flair reminiscent of Duchamp, he explores the social and personal implications of mixing abstraction and figuration.

Abhijeet Gondkar

(Abhijeet Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above excerpts are from review of Mehlli Gobhai’s solo show at Chemould Prescott Road in 2011)

"DON'T ASK ME ABOUT COLOUR" - Mehlli Gobhai, A Retrospective

   Curated by Nancy Adajania & Ranjit Hoskote

 6 March – 25 April, 2020

National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The Accidental Jacket

“The Accidental Jacket” includes a new series of paintings that anticipates Pratik Ghaisas’s playful studies of personal identity; he delivers a deeply felt experience of human absence in a new installation of exquisite subtlety. Each work is meticulously crafted to its own emotional note. Beautiful and rich in associative resonance, the piece eviscerates abstraction and lodges right in the bones. Between the moments of tenderness and the undertow of anguish, the form pulsates with the full spectrum of human emotion. Circling its exterior, its outermost arm forming a closed ring, we’re barred from entering; we become empathic onlookers of the whole human drama.

 Artist : Pratik Ghaisas

Artists of the previous generation, the Pop painters and Minimalists, who came of age in the 1960s, defined the unity of their concerns by creating distinctive visual styles a Warhol, like a Lichtenstein or a Donald Judd, is unmistakably their personal product. What links these visually varied early works together is what might best be called a consciously eccentric poetic sensibility, his irony-laced fascination with unexpected sensory pleasures. One basic, longstanding rule governing the visual arts is that pictures and words tell stories in essentially different ways, and so should not be mixed together. That the human mind can conceive of a nothing as a something is an extraordinary feat of intellectual abstraction.

Gazing down across the form suggestive of our galactic home, we’re led to consider our predicament in the universe. Bound inside time, acutely aware of our own smallness and finitude and yet feeling ourselves and those we love to be as large as the world, we live in eternal incongruity with our indifferent cosmos. The economy of means with which Ghaisas is able to evoke such ultimate questions is remarkable. Indeed, his use of a metonymically implied personal space to conjure the universal charges, the work with the kind of condensed expression we expect of great poetry. The human mind may be able to grasp negation between the abstract and the reasoning faculty founders when it comes to its own. Perhaps it’s only with the language of poetry that we can think the unthinkable and, if not exactly accept the unacceptable, dare to feel the flame in all its intensity.

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In the current series the artist brings together and explores the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay ‘Art and Object Hood’. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, or in working with one form or another, leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

The artist narrates how his father and his contemporaries were responsible for building audacious and imaginative meccas of free play, in particular that exceeded even the best paradigms. Examining the pictorial thinking of outsiders often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with Pratik Ghaisas. The correspondence to mainstream art in his work is not superficial. The diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work and beyond its psychological concerns, these jackets tell a dynamic story that change with each subsequent viewing.

Abhijeet Gondkar

March 2020, Mumbai

Visible Invisible

solo exhibition
by Pratik Ghaisas


2nd March To 8th March
11AM To 7 PM

Jehangir Art Gallery


Inauguration on 2nd March at 5pm.

Padamsee, an Eternal Student

On 7^th January 2020, the Governor of Maharashtra, Bhagat Singh Koshyari presented the first ‘Vasudeo Gaitonde Kala Jeevan Puraskar’ (Life Time Achievement Award in the Field of Art) to Late Akbar Padamsee (posthumously) at the 60^th Maharashtra State Art Exhibition held at Jehangir Art Gallery. An evening earlier, Akbar Padamsee passed away at the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore. He was excited when he heard of receiving the award that was dedicated to him in the name of his artist friend Vasudeo Gaitonde who was his senior by few years at Sir J. J.  School of Art.

Born on April 12, 1928, Padamsee’s ancestors hailed from Vāghnagar, a village in the Bhavnagar district of the erstwhile Kathiawar, now part of Gujarat. His grandfather was the sarpanch of the village and earned the title Padmashree or Padamsee after distributing his entire granary to the village during a famine. The family had belonged to Charana community, known as Deviputras (sons of the goddess). Charanas were essentially litterateurs and folklorist. Youngest amongst eight siblings, Akbar, as a child, stayed aloof and preferred to amuse himself with books. He also displayed an ardent interest in art that developed through photographs of gods and goddesses his nanny shared with him. The antique Irani furniture and flower vases that adorned his home also inspired him. At the age of four, he took to drawing in the margins of the account books and ledgers at his father’s shop of imported glass lanterns on Chakla Street, South Mumbai. In his primary school, he would draw caricatures on the black board before the class teacher would arrive, when the teacher would enquire, the classmates would point out to Padamsee, but she would never believe that such a young boy’s drawings had a mature finesse.

Akbar Padamsee

He was 11 years old when he accidentally stepped on a rusted nail, leading to a serious injury. While the wound was cured, the psychological impact left him speechless. It was more the will to speak that had gone away. Apparently, he did not speak a word for about nine years. Instead, he focused his energies on reading and art. After his father passed away, his elder brother Nicky (Nurudin), eight years his senior served as a father figure and gave him a book on Freud’s Introductory Lectures on psychoanalysis, dream interpretations and the psychopathology of everyday life. Not quite realizing what it was about, it was like tasting in advance what was going to come. Padamsee reciprocated with the writings of philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre and the likes; he believed that thinking was a system before one could paint. The influence of this can be seen in his later works. He chose to study at Sir J.J. School of Art, but Nicky advised him to join St. Xavier’s High School. At St. Xavier’s High School, Fort, he had a very strange school life. He was a back-bencher and day-dreamer who was always ridiculed by his classmates over his speech impediment. During school examinations, his elder brother helped him study, and somehow saved him from the kind of education that was doled out in those schools. Later, he met his first mentor, drawing teacher Shirsat, a water colourist, who tutored him in the medium, wines in Khandala, and nudes at a special class at Charni Road, in preparation for his studies at the Sir J. J. School of Art, enabling him to join the course directly in its third year.

 Poster done by M.F. Husain for Padamsee's Metascape show at Pundole,1975

Padamsee’s years at the art school came at a time when a lot of undercurrents were passing through the Indian Art world, the most important being the formation of the Progressive Artist Group. He learned the academic style of painting that was popular in those times but did not restrict himself to just that. Even as a young adult, he enthusiastically learnt what was beyond the norm. He would skip classes and spend hours in the college library, pouring over books and acquainting himself with the work of the Masters. He was more interested in the science of art inspired by formal conundrums and conceptual schemes in approaching his work and would often investigate Durer’s drawings, Piero della Francesca’s studies for the curve of a queen’s neck – he had made a complex grid as if it were for a bridge. One day, he found T.A. Gopinath Rao’s Elements of Hindu Iconography in the library and was amazed by the precise directions that were given to the bronze sculptors. It was later at the school of art that he used the concept of the grid as geometry of proportion; however, it was at the elementary level. He also read a book on principles of Chinese painting. However, it was only later that he developed these ideas further .Of his early days spent at Sir J. J. School of Art, he once claimed: “In those days, learning painting in that tree-studded campus was a heady experience”. Professor Shankar Palshikar introduced him to miniature paintings and burnishing the surface with cowrie shell to spread the color evenly to get a glaze effect, but Padamsee would be lazy to do it all by himself. His early work during that year started with detailed study of heads, prophets and different couples. Padamsee’s subjects appeared astute with a pondering gaze. He disliked the sentimental and refused to submerge his figures with that feeling. This is why; even when he portrays his nude protagonists, they lack any outward sensuality. Padamsee studied French and his art teacher, Shankar Palsikar, encouraged him to study Sanskrit, which later became the basis of Padamsee’s thought process and the foundational structure for his art.

Head, 11x9 in.  pencil on paper, 2000

After his completing his diploma in painting, he took up sculpture for a year; one afternoon, when he was rhythmically beating the sheet metal with a hammer to make a relief sculpture. In the adjacent studio, another professor called Sabannavar, from the metal-craft department, was busy with his work. Suddenly, he barged into Padamsee’s space and asked him to stop work. The cause of the professor’s anger was the sound that the artist was producing while beating the sheet. He knew from the sound that Padamsee was doing something wrong. He asked Padamsee if he was disturbed, to which Padamsee replied with a yes. Padamsee was thus sensitized to the importance of sound in art-making. Later, he would apply this lesson an accidental insight to his pictorial practice. In an interview with Homi Bhabha, he recalls: “The professor’s interpretation intrigued me and I decided to experiment with sound. I took a very heavy aluminum holder in which I inserted a felt pen. I then dipped it in ink and started hitting on my drawing paper stretched on the board, really hard. Next, I tried this on my charcoal and oil works on canvas board and had a whole show around these works. I was going by the sound. Finally, an image would emerge, and it was often said that I painted with dots, but in reality I was painting with sound.”

Padamsee was a student associate, not a formal member, of the Progressive Artist Group, founded by F.N. Souza, with Raza and M.F. Husain as members, among others, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. He along with Tyeb Mehta helped in installing works of the Progessives and other seniors like Mohan Samant. His father had a cyclostyle machine, with which he made copies of a catalogue of the show the Progressives had put up. That probably made him a blue-eyed boy. Later in 1948, an exhibition of paintings of student artists comprising of fifty artworks was organized by the Progressive Artist Group and was shown at the Bombay Art Society’s Salon. Francis Newton Souza, the then Secretary of the Progressive Artist Group said the exhibition was a novel idea and intended to draw attention of the public and art critics  to the works of art students. Padamsee’s paintings were highly appreciated by the art critics.

Nude, 11x14.5 in. pencil on paper, 2007

In 1950, a former student visited the school of art and showed interest in the works of the students. The senior was S.H. Raza. Padamsee told Raza that he was given third-class. Raza said he should have gotten a first-class with this work. Raza had received a scholarship to go to Paris and offered to take him along. Padamsee shared the news with Palshikar, who said he should see India first; next Padamsee brought himself a ticket to Madurai and visited the Meenakshi temple. Later in 1951 along with Raza he sailed to France, where Padamsee met the surrealist Stanley Hayter and started painting at a local studio, Atelier 17, and held his first show at Galerie Saint Placide in 1952. His first exhibition in Paris, which required artists to stay anonymous, saw Padamsee sharing the prize awarded for it by the French Journal d’Arte with the surrealist Carzou, then in his 40s. Thus began a never ending journey of honours and awards. He was featured in the 1959 Tokyo Biennale, he received a gold medal from the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1962 A fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York followed in 1965, and in 1969 the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, he was bestowed by Padma Bhushan and Kailash Lalit Kala award in 2010. His figurative works from the 1950s gave way to bronze heads the human expression was a lifelong preoccupation of Padamsee to photography. Exhibitions have been held at institutions worldwide, including the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and London’s Royal Academy of Art.

Padamsee always approached his art with deep thought and intense focus, constantly pushing boundaries and innovating in his creative process. During his illustrious career, Padamsee explored a wide range of mediums, and managed to remain fiercely experimental and individualistic. His 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, films 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 intensity and luminescence while his drawings exude a serene grace.

Akbar Padamsee has always been eclectic, drawing his inspiration from various sources. He spoke at length about the western and eastern philosophy, be it Paul Klee’s The Thinking Eye or Mammata’s Kavyaprakasha. He was on board with anything that helped him give an adequate structure to his own art. Never one up for an easy summing up of art, his work continues to take the viewers through an intense journey unmasking the mysteries of art, through his work and life.

Quoting Padamsee’s favourite line from the Isa Upanishad, there’s formlessness about great poetry that moves you. Addressing the sun, the speaker says, ‘Remove the glare, so that I can look at you face-to-face because I’m the very person that’s yonder; I’m the sun myself. When the heat of the sun reaches me, let the body be reduced to ashes; but may the mind remember, remember, remember… Om shanti, shanti, shanti…’

Abhijeet Gondkar

February 2020, Mumbai

(Abhijeet Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above extracts are from inputs by Bhanumati Padamsee, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation and further readings of Padamsee’s conversation with Homi Bhabha published by Marg. The above article was published as a tribute to Akbar Padamsee in ‘Roopa-Bheda’ 2019-20, an annual publication of Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai)