Untitled

Also included from the collection of Krishna Riboud is a work by Akbar Padamsee (b.1928), one of the founding members of the revolutionary Bombay Progressives Artists Group, formed in India in 1948, the year after its independence from England. Known for his archetypal landscapes, Padamsee depicts a world that is both real and transcendent, his forms often hovering on the boundary between abstraction and representation. Finding inspiration in the competing elements of earth, water, air and fire, Padamsee's works connote no specific time or place and instead become mythical examples of the natural world. In this beautiful early work from 1963, the artist paints vestiges of trees, earth and sky, allowing their forms to bleed into each other, in an allegorical unification of nature and its elements.