V.S. Gaitonde : Painting As Process, Painting As Life Hardcover

Sandhini Poddar

A seminal colourist whose career remains unparalleled in the history of South Asian modern art, V.S. Gaitonde was known to fellow artists and intellectuals as well as to later generations of students and collectors as a man of uncompromising integrity of spirit and purpose. Accompanying an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this book of major paintings and works on paper serves as a means to explore the context of Indian modern art as it played out in the metropolitan centres of Mumbai and New Delhi from the late 1940s through the end of the 20th century. It also introduces readers to a reclusive genius who developed a unique non-objective style that employed palette knives and paint rollers. The exquisite reproductions reveal Gaitonde's extraordinary use of colour, form and texture, as well as symbolic elements and calligraphy to create works that seem to glow with an inner light. A comprehensive essay relates Gaitonde's nuanced understanding of colour to major American, European and Asian traditions and movements, analyses the artist's use of the term "non-objective" within its historical context, and provides valuable insights into Gaitonde's life and work in the context of Indian modernism.

3791353780

English

Prestel

24 October 2014

128

Sandhini Poddar is an adjunct curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, working on special projects in New York and Abu Dhabi and guest curator for V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life. She has curated exhibitions internationally for the Guggenheim on the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, Zarina Hashmi, Amar Kanwar, and Anish Kapoor, among other artists.

Gaitonde's last decades were limited by injuries he suffered in an auto accident in Delhi in 1984. He died in 2001, just as Western interest in contemporary Asian art was reviving. The paintings and drawings in this retrospective not only confirm his achievements but also demonstrate the importance of Asian artists to modernism, a movement that for too long has been considered exclusively Western. --The Wall Street Journal "Mr. Gaitonde's triumph -- an unlikely word for so recessive a figure -- is also a triumph for a concept that Ms. Poddar calls, in her catalog essay, "polyphonic modernisms," the idea that varied but comparably vital versions of Modernism have flourished at different times and different places. In this revised vision of history, certain Western claims to innovation must be reconsidered." --The New York Times "Mr. Gaitonde's triumph -- an unlikely word for so recessive a figure -- is also a triumph for a concept that Ms. Poddar calls, in her catalog essay, "polyphonic modernisms," the idea that varied but comparably vital versions of Modernism have flourished at different times and different places. In this revised vision of history, certain Western claims to innovation must be reconsidered." --"The New York Times" "Gaitonde's last decades were limited by injuries he suffered in an auto accident in Delhi in 1984. He died in 2001, just as Western interest in contemporary Asian art was reviving. The paintings and drawings in this retrospective not only confirm his achievements but also demonstrate the importance of Asian artists to modernism, a movement that for too long has been considered exclusively Western." --The Wall Street Journal