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Lot Essay
Tracing the arc of Jehangir Sabavala’s artistic career from his first solo exhibition at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay in 1951 to his last, unfinished painting from 2010-11 currently on view at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay (CSMVS) in Mumbai, it is evident that the artist never stopped innovating in his practice. Constantly striving to refine his idiom, Sabavala often compared himself to a traveler or pilgrim. As he noted, “Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation. Horizons widen and receded, and I see myself as a pilgrim, moving towards unknown vistas.” (Artist statement, R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 216)
Discussing the artist’s paintings from the early 2000s, his biographer Ranjit Hoskote calls them “occasions of light” and observes that “Sabavala’s art derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape [...] The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises the forms of nature in his paintings is a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and topographies, and re-constitutes them as prismatic structures. Even the relatively abstractionist passages in Sabavala’s paintings are carefully modulated through this crystalline geometry; there is no leeway here for the haphazard gesture or the spontaneous pictorial effusion.” (R. Hoskote, 2005, pp. 168, 176-77)
In this painting from 2001 titled Stag-Antlered Tree II, Sabavala returns to a subject he first explored in 1967. This iteration, painted more than thirty years later, is quite unlike its predecessor, which used a subdued palette and vertical format to portray a few withered stumps along a narrow, desolate peninsula. Here, a lone tree branches out from the base of the canvas, its limbs appearing to reach beyond the confines of the pictorial space. More closely resembling the branching antlers of a stag, this tree seems vital and resilient, leafless only because of the changing seasons. Behind its branches, some light stippling suggests clouds, and a few topographical features establish perspective. The most striking feature of the painting, however, is its background, vertically segmented into seven bands, resembling a Japanese folding screen. Each painted in a different primary color, these bands perhaps represent different moments and qualities of light during the diurnal or seasonal cycles.
Noting a similar focus on specific moments in the day in other paintings from the period like Sunburst, Lunar Magic and the Casuarina Line series, Hoskote notes that in these works the artist also departs from his previous paintings and seems to expose “the machinery of his composition, makes it the real subject [...] the painting is demonstrated as the result of heaped bands or stacked panels, formats drawn from tradition.” (R. Hoskote, 2005, p. 187)
Discussing the artist’s paintings from the early 2000s, his biographer Ranjit Hoskote calls them “occasions of light” and observes that “Sabavala’s art derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape [...] The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises the forms of nature in his paintings is a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and topographies, and re-constitutes them as prismatic structures. Even the relatively abstractionist passages in Sabavala’s paintings are carefully modulated through this crystalline geometry; there is no leeway here for the haphazard gesture or the spontaneous pictorial effusion.” (R. Hoskote, 2005, pp. 168, 176-77)
In this painting from 2001 titled Stag-Antlered Tree II, Sabavala returns to a subject he first explored in 1967. This iteration, painted more than thirty years later, is quite unlike its predecessor, which used a subdued palette and vertical format to portray a few withered stumps along a narrow, desolate peninsula. Here, a lone tree branches out from the base of the canvas, its limbs appearing to reach beyond the confines of the pictorial space. More closely resembling the branching antlers of a stag, this tree seems vital and resilient, leafless only because of the changing seasons. Behind its branches, some light stippling suggests clouds, and a few topographical features establish perspective. The most striking feature of the painting, however, is its background, vertically segmented into seven bands, resembling a Japanese folding screen. Each painted in a different primary color, these bands perhaps represent different moments and qualities of light during the diurnal or seasonal cycles.
Noting a similar focus on specific moments in the day in other paintings from the period like Sunburst, Lunar Magic and the Casuarina Line series, Hoskote notes that in these works the artist also departs from his previous paintings and seems to expose “the machinery of his composition, makes it the real subject [...] the painting is demonstrated as the result of heaped bands or stacked panels, formats drawn from tradition.” (R. Hoskote, 2005, p. 187)