Young Pudamsee

One of India?s greatest modern artists, Akbar Padamsee (1928-2020), always approached his art with deep thought and intense focus. Constantly pushing boundaries and innovating in his creative process, he remained fiercely experimental and individualistic throughout a career that spanned six decades. ?You need the mind of a mathematician and poet to be a painter,? Padamsee explained in 2018, when we visited him in his studio in his native Mumbai. ?At the age of 12 he was reading Freud?s lectures on psychoanalysis, and at 90, when we last met, he continued to read, study and paint tirelessly,? reveals Nishad Avari, Head of Sale for South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at Christie?s. ?Over the course of his career, he absorbed the conventions of various Eastern and Western artistic traditions, identified which had the greatest expressive effectiveness, and synthesized them into his unique visual vocabulary.? Working in a variety of media, from oil painting to watercolours, sculpture, printmaking and photography, Padamsee concentrated on a few chosen genres: prophets (including Jesus Christ), heads, couples, still-life, grey works, metascapes and mirror images. His obsession with depicting the human face was clear from his earliest paintings. As he explained, ?Expression is all the more powerful when it is about a solitary figure?.