Footnotes

Provenance
Private Mumbai Collection: commissioned directly from the artist in 1999.
Private Dubai Collection: acquired by the owner from the above in 2012.

Note: This work has been verified with the artist's wife, Bhanu Padamsee.

Born in Maharashtra, India in 1928, Akbar Padamsee embarked on his career as a painter whilst studying at St Xavier's High School, Fort. It was here that he was introduced to the medium of watercolours by his first mentor and teacher, Shirsat. He subsequently learnt how to paint nudes in preparation for his studies at Sir J J School of Art. It was during his time at the school that the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) was formed in 1947 by fellow alumni S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain and Francis Newton Souza, and that greatly affected him and his works.

Upon graduation in 1951, Padamsee travelled to Paris and held an exhibition which received international recognition, and he was awarded a prize by André Breton on behalf of the Journal d'Art. A year later he held his first solo show at the Galerie Saint Placide, which was followed by other exhibitions throughout the world, including the Biennales of Venice, Tokyo and São Paulo and exhibitions at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the Royal Academy of Art in London and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford.

Over a career that spanned six decades, he continued to experiment, innovate and push boundaries by working in a variety of media that included printmaking, photography, sculpture, oil painting and watercolours. He received numerous awards some of which include the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 1962, the Rockefeller Foundation scholarship in 1965, the Kalidas Samman for plastic arts from the Madhya Pradesh government in 1997 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010, India's third highest civilian honour.

Padamsee best sums up his art philosophy when he says 'Art for me is to express the invisible," he replied. "No morality, no values, no hierarchy can enter its field.'(See Asian Art: Studio Visit, Akbar Padamsee: 'Art for me is to express the invisible', 3 March 2020, Christie's Features).