Ganesh Pyne (1937 - 2013)

Acquired from the Saffronart & Pundole Modern Indian Art exhibition, New York, 2001

San Jose Museum of Art, Modern and Contemporary Art from India, February - September 2011

Very slight losses and abrasions to red pigment along the top edge on the upper right corner and middle right edge. Some further minor losses to the green foreground on the lower right corner and to the yellow on the lower middle foreground, both clearly visible in the catalog illustration. Minor abrasions to the red pigment above the woman's hair and along the petals to the left, visible in the catalog illustration.
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Trained initially as an animator, Ganesh Pyne has developed a personalized language derived from Bengali folklore mythology and Puranic texts. His works are far from sentimental through a liberal use of distortion, exaggeration and grotesque imagery. Pyne's signature technique in tempera was developed in the late 1960s recalling that of medieval miniature painters who glazed their works with natural dye and used egg-whites as a fixitif over each layer of colour allowing the painting surface to harden. Pyne also paints in transparent layers with natural pigments he mixed using vegetable gums from acacia trees. His early experiments with indigenous powder pigments and a variety of binding agents allowed him to develop a unique way of building up texture on a surface that appears incandescent. This was a pain-staking process, sometimes taking months complete. Pyne admits to being an intensely private person and his human figures tend to be solitary, introspective beings. In the current work the lonely figure of a dancing girl stands with her arms outstretched, but the significance of her raised palms is ambiguous. It is unclear if she intends to explore the world around her or if her hands are raised to defend herself from the world she cannot see. The coat rack on the left resembles a human skeleton, a memento mori that is prevalent in a lot of Pyne’s works.