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Lot Essay
Exploring the thresholds of myth and reality, Ganesh Pyne was a master of crafting ethereal scenes that elude explanation and interpretation. Characteristic of his later works, this evocative painting mines the ambiguities of post-independence Modernist aesthetics, veering away from his initial experiments in delicate brushwork and contours, à la Gaganendranath Tagore. He constructs alternate worlds through the use of lush dark blues and earthy shades of brown, diffused line work and atmospheric settings, and calls upon the viewer to subjectively interact with his obscured figures and umbral landscapes.
As a child, he experienced the desecration of a temple dear to him that stood in front of his family house, and the obliteration of the icons within. He seems to celebrate the obliteration in the form of the shadow figure here, and explore the freedom of a world beyond representationality. “The image is a pretext. What the worshipper worships is the void, the darkness, the cosmos.” (R. Hoskote, Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Galerie 88, Mumbai, 2005, p. 11)
Ganesh Pyne drew from a range of sources for inspiration. He looked to cinema, folklore, religious iconography, and his predecessors’ works to construct an elaborate language of symbols and forms. Consequently, his images outstrip their influences to form unique spaces of imagination, rich spiritual and historical referentiality, and modernist invention. Pyne, above all, was an innovator who rose above fads and fashions to produce some of India’s most evocative, haunting, and masterful Modernist art.
As a child, he experienced the desecration of a temple dear to him that stood in front of his family house, and the obliteration of the icons within. He seems to celebrate the obliteration in the form of the shadow figure here, and explore the freedom of a world beyond representationality. “The image is a pretext. What the worshipper worships is the void, the darkness, the cosmos.” (R. Hoskote, Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Galerie 88, Mumbai, 2005, p. 11)
Ganesh Pyne drew from a range of sources for inspiration. He looked to cinema, folklore, religious iconography, and his predecessors’ works to construct an elaborate language of symbols and forms. Consequently, his images outstrip their influences to form unique spaces of imagination, rich spiritual and historical referentiality, and modernist invention. Pyne, above all, was an innovator who rose above fads and fashions to produce some of India’s most evocative, haunting, and masterful Modernist art.