Fan the Flame

The Pop Art movement launched the banal objects of our everyday lives into the realm of fine art, asking the viewer to confront the soup can, the comic strip and newspaper clipping in monumental and very public ways. While the New York artists of the 1960's glorified the banal in large dramatic formats, Prabakhar Barwe works are frank and candid, recreating the intimate environments that these things share with us in life. Painting a few isolated objects on a canvas, the artist allows each object to exist in its own right, related to, but not disturbing, those around it. Explaining his choice of subject matter, Barwe states "However ordinary or commonplace it may look at first sight, if it is based on self experience and if it springs directly from the heart, it becomes self evident, a valid aesthetic experience in a work of art."
Prabhakar Barwe, "Prabhakar Barwe", Spear Museum of Art, http://www.cyberadsstudio.com/SPEAR/bharve/index.shtml, retrieved 10 February 2005.