Akbar Padamsee (b. 1928)

Padamsee's iconic heads are a fascinating marker of the development of the artist's visual language and creative process. The thick angular contours of his early works gradually gave way to a softer more fluid line with flat planes of color skillfully used to impart an almost transcendent texture to the surface of the canvas. The defining quality of the works though is a sense of vulnerability and loneliness. With their pensive introspective expressions, the faces are imbued with an ineffable sadness, seemingly echoing not just personal anguish but the nature of human existence. The striking aspect to this recent work is that the artist has chosen to place the figure within an equally sombre landscape that clearly relates compositionally to his Metascape series. The artist expresses his absorption with this solitary state when he says that, "expression is all the more powerful when it is about a solitary figure or just a face." (A. K. Datta, 1992, p. 2)