Delhi: Saffronart celebrates a late, legendary artist who was an inspiration for an entire abstract movement

An art event like this is worth marking in your calendar and witnessing for yourself. An event on the late Jagdish Swaminathan, titled The Symbolism of Swaminathan: A Journey Through the Years featuring 36 works, ranging from early paintings from the 1960s to his famous ‘Bird, Mountain, Tree' series, are all on show at the Oberoi, New Delhi.

Abstract Guru

Swaminathan the thinker, critic, founding father who discovered the tribal richness of India's indigenous arts also set up Bharat Bhavan, and was the forerunner and inspiration for an entire abstract movement. His words written many in the Lalit Kala Contemporary Journals in 1995, form the fulcrum of his philosophy and art. “There is something in the vast complex of our racial psyche, from the austere, crystalline poetry of our Vedic forbears to the awesome pantheon of gods and demons, from the abstract metaphysics of Hindu thought to the threatening totems of the folk ritual, that bears its head against the wall of the Pseudoscience that our so-called intelligentsia has inherited from Modern Western culture.” — J Swaminathan, 'The New Promise', Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, March 1995.

1960's Works

The Emerging Sign and another Untitled work belonging to the 1960's spell his love for nature and indigenous rootedness. These two works also have alphabetics of language as well as tribal elements of geometry and symbolism. Historical notes suggest that it was in the late 1960s, that Swaminathan did a series called Colour Geometry of Space. Thus began his medley of combining elements from nature in his conceptual landscapes. Mountains, trees, rocks, and an archetypal bird defying gravity, juxtaposed against a pure expanse of colour to induce meditative stillness.

Genesis of Mountain, Trees and Birds

他借了“神圣的形象”这个词来自菲利普Rawson to speak about his 'para-natural', magical and mysterious space that is not obvious but is inherent everywhere. Two works in the show from 1970's are Light and Lithe, as they conform to his artistic practice that delved deep into free association and the symbolism of nature. Inspired by tribal arts and motifs, these two paintings are ephemeral and soft, the strokes of the mountain, the bird and the moon speak of his contemplation on the subliminal as well as the distilled idiom of nature's rhythms. According to art history, Swaminathan began work on a series of paintings during the 1970s which he called Time and Space. The iconography of the bird, the mountain, the tree, the reflection and the shadow, became his tenor of symbolism and did in a quaint way embrace the metaphorical quality of the surrealists, even as it was seeking to preserve the formal qualities of Indian miniatures.

One-of-a-Kind

Of greatest intrigue and perfection of intent are his Untitled (Bird Tree and Mountains Series), which epitomise Swaminathan's fascination for developing a pure and true form of representation that was rooted in Indian philosophy and dynamics of living. Swaminathan did not believe in blindly aping the West—he argued that traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic sense. In 1962 Swaminathan joined fellow artists to form Delhi based artist Group, 1890. They rejected ideals of Western Modernism and the "vulgar naturalism and pastoral idealism of the Bengal School," instead seeking to "see phenomena in its virginal state."—Y. Kumar (ed.), Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence, New Delhi, 1997, p. 298.

1980's and 1990's

His love for exploring Indianesque idioms made him lean towards paradigms of purity, revealing an alternate reality that was primal, spiritual and deeply mystical. Tribal and folk imagery for Swaminathan were catalysts of cohesion and creativity. If we look at his works from the 1980's and 1990's we see that his creation of a formal visual language was at once filled with numerous interpretations and textual as well as textural nuances that conveyed an in-depth understanding of surrealism as well as abstract moorings of translating nature's many manifestations into sheer subtle geometry.

Geometry Amidst Colour Tones

In his paintings, Swaminathan used colour to represent an introspective universal reality. "To understand colour as harmony was to limit oneself to look at it as representation, be it in terms of nature association or representation. Geometric areas of colour in certain juxtapositions created infinity on a two dimensional plane. [...] Here all the rules of tonalities, of harmonies, of warm and cool colour broke down. Thus primary colours could be used to achieve an inward growing, meditative space [...] The introduction of representational forms in the context of colour geometry gave birth to psycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain, a tree, a flower, a bird, a stone were not just objects or parts of a landscape but were manifestations of the universal.'' — Artist statement, 'Modern Indian Art: the Visible and The Possible', Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 49.

In the 1990s, during the last few years of his life, the artist returned to his symbolist practice after moving back to Madhya Pradesh, inspired once again by tribal arts and motifs. Abstraction for Swaminathan was born of an internal quest for harmony and a deeper leaning towards spirituality was intuitive. This stellar show brings back his words again: “Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings.”

The Symbolism of Swaminathan: A Journey Through the Years will be open to public from 23-30 January 2020, at The Oberoi, New Delhi