Jagdish Swaminathan (1929-1994)

Dhoomi Mal Gallery, Delhi, September 1974

Dhoomi Mal Gallery, Delhi, 30 September - 8 October 1974

A Scene in Dhoomi Mal Gallery, The Economic Times, India, 6 October 1974

Good overall condition. Very faint wrinkle in canvas upper left corner. Light drip stains from varnish along bottom edge.
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The current work, Lily by My Window, was shown in a 1974 inaugural exhibition showcasing such Modern masters as Vasudeo Gaitonde, MF Husain, Paramjit Singh, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar and Shanti Dave.

For Jagdish Swaminathan, traditional Indian painting was never meant to represent reality in a naturalistic, objective manner. As such, his landscapes became metaphors or pictorial tools for understanding of the Indian concept of maya, the illusory nature of the manifest world. In the Bird, Tree and Mountain series, from which the current work is derived, Swaminathan melds together aspects of the indigenous aesthetic, including miniature paintings with their stylized compositions and forms, coupled with a bold use of color.

Underlying Swaminathan's iconic conceptual landscape is a spiritual reverence for the unrealized universe, or prakriti. The flat planes of saturated greens and yellows delineate and contrast the assymetrical segments of fine detailing. The mountainous forms appear to be abstracted in the manner of an aerial map, but conceptually, the works are more complex. Swaminathan's signature delicate bird, the only identifiable feature of the current work, creates a scale which suggests that the landscape is rather a magnified view of minutiae. Regardless of these intentional ambiguities, paintings from this series masterfully resonate order and serenity.

"Given the life of the canvas and the colors," explains the artist, "a painting is immutable, fixed and eternal. It does not know growth or decay. Yet it has a life of its own, inasmuch as it is never the same to any two persons in space or even the same person in time." (Jagdish Swaminathan, "The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art," in Lalit Kala Contemporary, April 29, 1980, pp.5-10)