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Lot Essay
Lily by my Window, encapsulates Swaminathan's perennial search for means of pure, true representation. He argued that traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic objective sense. In 1962 Swaminathan joined with fellow artists to form the Delhi based artist collective Group 1890. They rejected ideals of Western Modernism and the "vulgar naturalism and pastoral idealism of the Bengal School," instead seeking to "see phenomena in its virginal state." (Y. Kumar, ed., Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence, New Delhi, 1997, p. 298) By the late 1960s, Swaminathan started to develop an artistic philosophy which sought to renew tribal and folk art in a contemporary context. Swaminathan created a body of work which proposes a paradigm of primitive purity, revealing an alternate reality that is primal, spiritual and mystical.
Through delicate combinations of stylized signifiers and ephemeral elements, Lily by my Window, is the product of a conceptual construct that is simultaneously meditative and metaphorical. The pervasive yellow hues echo through the expanse of the canvas, the bird hovers without flying above a stone which itself defies gravity. The smooth virtuosic handling of paint is broken only by the central Lily, rendered in pronounced impasto. The artist creates a world that transcends time and space and induces the meditative stillness that became his obsession.
"Swaminathan treats images like the numen in nature -- that is metaphorically, but in a sense where the metaphor is now detached from the material-mythical world, and lifted into the ethereal spheres of lyric art and poetry." (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Art, London, 1982, p. 7) The artist borrowed the term 'numinous image' from Philip Rawson to speak about his 'para-natural', magical and mysterious space that is not obvious but is inherent everywhere.
Through delicate combinations of stylized signifiers and ephemeral elements, Lily by my Window, is the product of a conceptual construct that is simultaneously meditative and metaphorical. The pervasive yellow hues echo through the expanse of the canvas, the bird hovers without flying above a stone which itself defies gravity. The smooth virtuosic handling of paint is broken only by the central Lily, rendered in pronounced impasto. The artist creates a world that transcends time and space and induces the meditative stillness that became his obsession.
"Swaminathan treats images like the numen in nature -- that is metaphorically, but in a sense where the metaphor is now detached from the material-mythical world, and lifted into the ethereal spheres of lyric art and poetry." (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Art, London, 1982, p. 7) The artist borrowed the term 'numinous image' from Philip Rawson to speak about his 'para-natural', magical and mysterious space that is not obvious but is inherent everywhere.