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Lot Essay
What gives Pyne's work distinctiveness is the artist's involvement with his art. His life, his world, indeed his whole being is focused on this act of creation. He is most at home with his own inner world of darkness and light from which emerges the strange forms. The canvases are a reflection of this all-absorbing interior life.
- Ella Datta, 1998
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories that his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home, often with tarer putul or string puppets. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent influenced Pyne to create visual narratives populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, titled Night of the Puppeteer, Pyne brings these memories into a new contextual space where they become a metaphor for the struggles of humans within the cycle of life and death. Here, Pyne portrays a puppeteer and his marionette, both prone and seemingly lifeless under an inky blue night sky. A lone arm suspended above them suggests the deception of the puppeteer’s act, yet with his mask-like countenance and hollowed-out eyes, Pyne has made it difficult for viewers to ascribe him with any more ‘humanness’ than they do his puppet. Manipulating light and shadow with dexterity using multiple layers of translucent tempera, this work like most of Pyne’s work seems to emerge from unexplored, interstitial spaces, simultaneously evoking balance and uncertainty, beauty and violence. Recognizing these dichotomies, the artist noted, “True darkness gives on a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere” (Artist statement, ‘Ganesh Pyne in Conversation with Arany Banerjee’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, April 1993).
- Ella Datta, 1998
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories that his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home, often with tarer putul or string puppets. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent influenced Pyne to create visual narratives populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, titled Night of the Puppeteer, Pyne brings these memories into a new contextual space where they become a metaphor for the struggles of humans within the cycle of life and death. Here, Pyne portrays a puppeteer and his marionette, both prone and seemingly lifeless under an inky blue night sky. A lone arm suspended above them suggests the deception of the puppeteer’s act, yet with his mask-like countenance and hollowed-out eyes, Pyne has made it difficult for viewers to ascribe him with any more ‘humanness’ than they do his puppet. Manipulating light and shadow with dexterity using multiple layers of translucent tempera, this work like most of Pyne’s work seems to emerge from unexplored, interstitial spaces, simultaneously evoking balance and uncertainty, beauty and violence. Recognizing these dichotomies, the artist noted, “True darkness gives on a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere” (Artist statement, ‘Ganesh Pyne in Conversation with Arany Banerjee’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, April 1993).