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Lot Essay
Born in Simla in 1931, Avinash Chandra divided his time between his scenic hometown and Delhi, where he lived and worked for the first few years of his career. He studied at Delhi Polytechnic, graduating in 1952, and then spent another few years teaching there. Recognized at a young age as a talented artist, Chandra received encouragement from several senior artists and also received a variety of awards validating his choice to pursue painting as a career. However, he soon found Delhi and the Polytechnic artistically claustrophobic, and moved to London with his wife, settling in Golders Green in 1956.
In London, Chandra encountered and was deeply influenced by the work of Western modernists, and his own work started to transition slowly but surely from naturalism to abstraction. Chandra’s first exhibition in London was held in 1957 at the Imperial Institute, and was followed in quick succession by others at the National Gallery and Museum of Ireland and the Architectural Association, London, both in 1958, and Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1959, winning him critical acclaim in his first few years in Europe. Profiled by art historian W.G. Archer in a 1962 documentary for the BBC, he was compared to contemporary Western artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
The present lot, Untitled (Belfast Landscape), was painted in 1958 and offers the artist’s impressions of the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland, where he stayed for a brief time in 1958-59. Representing his passage from realistic landscapes to the largely abstract compositions that he painted from the early 1960s onward, this painting illustrates what Archer termed the “gradual sense of liberation” that Chandra felt on moving to London. “He sloughed his former cautious style. He absorbed modern Western art and in 1958 began to paint instinctively, trusting like Klee, Kandinsky and his predecessor, Tagore, to ‘what was freely given’” (B. Khanna, Avinash Chandra, London, 1981, unpaginated).
Here, Chandra depicts the Irish city using blocky arrangements of architectonic forms, thick outlines and bold colors. Suggesting that the artistic discoveries he made in Britain actually brought him closer to the traditions of his native India, Chandra said these dual strands of inspiration allowed him to reinterpret the architecture and landscapes he painted in the late 1950s. Along the same lines, art critic George Butcher posits that works from this period in Chandra’s oeuvre hint, perhaps subconsciously, at Indian patterning, and are symbolic of his “moulting into an ‘Indian’ artist” (Humanscapes, Avinash Chandra: A Retrospective, New Delhi, 2015, p. 30).
In London, Chandra encountered and was deeply influenced by the work of Western modernists, and his own work started to transition slowly but surely from naturalism to abstraction. Chandra’s first exhibition in London was held in 1957 at the Imperial Institute, and was followed in quick succession by others at the National Gallery and Museum of Ireland and the Architectural Association, London, both in 1958, and Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1959, winning him critical acclaim in his first few years in Europe. Profiled by art historian W.G. Archer in a 1962 documentary for the BBC, he was compared to contemporary Western artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
The present lot, Untitled (Belfast Landscape), was painted in 1958 and offers the artist’s impressions of the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland, where he stayed for a brief time in 1958-59. Representing his passage from realistic landscapes to the largely abstract compositions that he painted from the early 1960s onward, this painting illustrates what Archer termed the “gradual sense of liberation” that Chandra felt on moving to London. “He sloughed his former cautious style. He absorbed modern Western art and in 1958 began to paint instinctively, trusting like Klee, Kandinsky and his predecessor, Tagore, to ‘what was freely given’” (B. Khanna, Avinash Chandra, London, 1981, unpaginated).
Here, Chandra depicts the Irish city using blocky arrangements of architectonic forms, thick outlines and bold colors. Suggesting that the artistic discoveries he made in Britain actually brought him closer to the traditions of his native India, Chandra said these dual strands of inspiration allowed him to reinterpret the architecture and landscapes he painted in the late 1950s. Along the same lines, art critic George Butcher posits that works from this period in Chandra’s oeuvre hint, perhaps subconsciously, at Indian patterning, and are symbolic of his “moulting into an ‘Indian’ artist” (Humanscapes, Avinash Chandra: A Retrospective, New Delhi, 2015, p. 30).