.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Untitled (Bird, Tree and Mountain Series) epitomizes Jagdish Swaminathan’s fascination with developing a pure and true form of representation through art. He argued that traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic sense, and drew inspiration from folk and tribal art forms, Pahari miniatures and Indian mythology, rejecting the conventions of Western naturalism. From the late 1960s, Swaminathan settled upon a now instantly recognizable visual aesthetic in this quest, using images intended to reveal an alternate reality that is primal, spiritual and mystical.
In this painting, Swaminathan uses color as a means of representing an introspective universal reality. “To understand colour as harmony was to limit oneself to look at it as representation, be it in terms of nature association or representation. Geometreic areas of colour in certain juxtapositions created infinity on a two dimensional plane […] Here all the rules of tonalities, of harmonies, of warm and cool colour broke down. Thus primary colours could be used to achieve an inward growing, meditative space […] The introduction of representational forms in the context of colour geometry gave birth to phycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain, a tree, a flower, a bird, a stone were not just objects or parts of a landscape but were manifestations of the universal’’ (Artist statement, ‘Modern Indian Art: the Visible and The Possible’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 49). Here, the segments of yellow that dominate the background pay tribute to Basholi miniature paintings that deeply influenced the artist, not for their stylistic or compositional power but their non-naturalistic use of color.
This painting exemplifies Swaminathan’s pictorial dichotomization of reality and illusion in its existence between naturalism and abstraction. Using his signature stylized tri-signifiers of bird, tree and mountain, Swaminathan conjures a two dimensional cosmos that is both meditative and metaphorical. The bird stands as if straddling two different planes, with the trees hovering above and mountains protruding from below. Swaminathan constructs a world that transcends time and space and induces a meditative stillness that became the artist's obsession.
In this painting, Swaminathan uses color as a means of representing an introspective universal reality. “To understand colour as harmony was to limit oneself to look at it as representation, be it in terms of nature association or representation. Geometreic areas of colour in certain juxtapositions created infinity on a two dimensional plane […] Here all the rules of tonalities, of harmonies, of warm and cool colour broke down. Thus primary colours could be used to achieve an inward growing, meditative space […] The introduction of representational forms in the context of colour geometry gave birth to phycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain, a tree, a flower, a bird, a stone were not just objects or parts of a landscape but were manifestations of the universal’’ (Artist statement, ‘Modern Indian Art: the Visible and The Possible’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 49). Here, the segments of yellow that dominate the background pay tribute to Basholi miniature paintings that deeply influenced the artist, not for their stylistic or compositional power but their non-naturalistic use of color.
This painting exemplifies Swaminathan’s pictorial dichotomization of reality and illusion in its existence between naturalism and abstraction. Using his signature stylized tri-signifiers of bird, tree and mountain, Swaminathan conjures a two dimensional cosmos that is both meditative and metaphorical. The bird stands as if straddling two different planes, with the trees hovering above and mountains protruding from below. Swaminathan constructs a world that transcends time and space and induces a meditative stillness that became the artist's obsession.