Akbar Padamsee (B.1928)

Akbar Padamsee (B.1928) Born in Mumbai in 1928, Akbar Padmsee graduated from the Sir J J School of Arts in 1951, with a Diploma in Painting. Following this, he went to live and work in France in 1951. His very first solo show was in Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 1954, where some of his early works were shown. He experiments with a wide range of mediums: the gamut of the traditional ones to his recent experiments with photography and digital printmaking. Although he is best known for his Grey Works and Metascapes, Padamsee has experimented with film-making, sculpture, and writing as an art critic as well. It is not the categorisation of his work which is of consequence, but rather the relationships with form, volume, space, time, and colour. The most familiar works from his extensive oeuvre are the Metascapes and mirror images, and the figures and heads, which he alternates between. The Metascapes are a development from landscapes, borne from an interest in Sanskrit texts such as the Abhijanashakuntalam, while the mirror images show his concern with the duality of existence, of form and space. The figure is treated not as an individual, not even in the heads where the association with portraiture is even stronger. s in 1997, with his Gandhi series of works on paper in watercolour and charcoal.