Jagdish Swaminathan

During the 1960s, Jagdish Swaminathan abandoned his career as a journalist and became a professional painter. In August 1962, he founded Group 1890. The name was derived from the address where the first meeting took place. Group 1890 had no regional or aesthetic affiliations and did not promote any particular type of painting. Members urged artists to draw inspiration from the natural world and interpret it into symbolic and abstracted forms; to see phenomena in their 'virginal state'. 

The early decades of Swaminathan's practice were defined by his 'Bird, Tree and Mountain' series. These landscapes revealed perfect, featureless planes, rendered in pop colours, adorned with solitary tree and elegant bird. By contrast, from the 1980s through to the end of his career, Swaminathan experimented with earthier tones, textural paint application and more geometrically focused compositions, as a result of the artist’s increasing interaction with the indigenous art of his home.

During the 1980s, Swaminathan turned to the forms and symbols of tribal art for inspiration and his canvases from this period reflect this evocative new ethos. He recalls a story from his childhood which sparked a lifelong curiosity of tribal practices: 'A young boy had been bitten by a snake and the witch doctor was reviving the boy by continuous chant and throwing pot fulls of water on him. We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered and the snake, which had been imprisoned in an earthen pot, was let off and disappeared into a thick bamboo grove. This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life.' (J. Swaminathan: An Exhibition of Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery, 1993)

Shapes such as the triangle, rectangle and the circle appear frequently in these later works, which take on a more nuanced symbolic significance. The signature upward pointing triangle, for instance, came to represent a more abstracted and sparing rendition of Swaminathan's famous mountains, which in the Hindu context may be interpreted as the abode of Shiva. Often accompanying Shiva, the snake is represented by curvy lines that slither over the canvas. Symbols replace realistic portrayals of nature and recall the neo-tantra movement that many Indian artists adopted.

In the current lot, atop a richly textured ground of yellow and brown, Swaminathan sets a grid of black geometric patterns. Two vibrant orange flourishes and daubs of red at the left and right borders frame the inner square. Texture plays a significant role in the canvas, with both added and recessive dimension, for instance shown in the chevron pattern etched into the black pigment along the bottom of the grid. Crowded, angular elements stand in stark contrast to three black dots within the square, floating above a metaphysical world of geometric symbols.