By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS
New Delhi : Master abstractionist Ambadas has brought back a slice of the creative ’60s to the capital with his new cache ‘Sublime Encounters’, a series of bright colourful forms that defy artistic conventions and limitations of figurative art.
The show, on till Feb 15 at the Delhi Art Gallery, revives memories of the fabled ‘GROUP 1890’, a “rag-tag” army of artistic rebels, who rejected convention for creativity.
Painted in mixed media, the compositions use automobile oil, kerosene, linseed oil and oil-based paints to convey “the mystery of creation” in floating floral shapes that spread across the canvases like a tapestry and suggest “harmony in chaos”. The shapes twine together in compact masses to give a textile-like feel – a probable consequence of the fact that Ambadas spent several years designing textiles at the country’s Handloom Board.
Eighty-five-year-old Ambadas, born in India and living in Norway since 1972, was integral to GROUP 1890. “This group, formed by about 12 artists in 1962, created artistic space for itself in the capital’s eclectic art scene of the ’60s by being unconventional,” artist Ambadas told IANS.
Unbridled creativity was its slogan – which entailed breaking away from the prevailing influences of conceptual European realism, impressionism and “rejecting the naturalism of Raja Ravi Verma and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal masters”, the artist explained.
GROUP 1890, named after the number of a member’s residence in Delhi, was greeted with bouquets and brickbats. The spirit behind the group was Left-leaning artist and art critic J. Swaminathan and it managed to put up only one exhibition in 1963. “Then we went our way. But we would love to get together for one big GROUP 1890 show,” Ambadas told IANS.
When asked to walk down memory lane – the articulate artist with a shock of wavy white mane – became nostalgic. “It was around the late ’50s that we felt that not much was happening in the country in terms of creative art. There was Santiniketan on one side, and traditional art and elaborate landscapes on the other, as well a bit of foreign influence. Europe was very active. But we wanted our own ideology, our own perceptions,” he recalled.
According to the artist, art then was “geometric, science oriented and connected to earth”. “The material affluence of Europe coupled with Indian traditions were limiting influences, and artists could not give vent to their creativity.” GROUP 1890 debated and decided to give free play to their creative expressions unshackled by traditions and artistic conventions.
Hence, the genre: abstraction.
Ambadas is obsessed with creativity and draws inspiration from the American creative art tradition of the ’50s and ’60s – ‘Abstract Expressionist’ – made popular by American art critic Clement Greenberg, who was very close to the father of modern American abstraction Jackson Pollock, the man who influenced Ambadas.
“Greenberg came to India with a body of works by a few abstract expressionists. And we were all impressed and inspired,” remembers the artist.
Ambadas culls his themes from nature. “All my works exist in harmony with nature and I want to go down to the root of creativity,” says the artist, when asked to interpret his own work. “I love the way my colours spread on wet canvas and papers, creating shapes and strange forms. It is imagination’s free run.”
His brush with abstraction began as a young man in his hometown Akola in Maharashtra. “I walking down a wet street on a rainy afternoon and I noticed passing cars spilling petrol on the wet tarmac. They formed a strange pattern. I was mesmerised.”
That’s how it began, his life-long love affair with “complex patterns” in search for the seed of creative form – “the fountainhead of energy”.
The artist as well as fellow GROUP 1890 member, Jyoti Bhatt, feel that Indian art is going in the right direction. “It is open to interpretation. There is something for everyone,” he said.