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. In the mid 1990's he began a series of large format charcoal works on canvas of which the current lot is a powerful example. 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, 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)