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拍品专文
What gives Pyne's work distinctiveness is the artist's involvement with his art. His life, his world, indeed his whole being is focused on this act of creation. He is most at home with his own inner world of darkness and light from which emerges the strange forms. The canvases are a reflection of this all-absorbing interior life.
- Ella Datta, 1998
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the partition of the Indian Subcontinent, influenced Pyne to create visual narratives populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, an enigmatic painting from 1987 titled The Slave, Pyne offers what is likely an imaginative metaphor about the nature of modern life. Drawing on his experience creating characters for animated films in the early 1960s, the artist centers this painting on the anthropomorphic figure of a dog. Although the animal wears an elaborate gold crown and appears to be relaxing on a comfortable piece of upholstered furniture with its forelegs crossed in front of it, there is no escaping its blank stare, almost skeletal neck and torso, and the wide gold collar and leash that tethers it to a point beyond the frame. Seemingly content with the two bones that have been tossed to it, this macabre figure is also a dystopian one, representing the masses of people who remain unknowingly and slavishly trapped in the urban rat race. Although they may appear to be thriving, Pyne seems to suggest that this is only at the will of those who toss them bones, and their reality is a Pavlovian one, where constant repetition has dehumanized them.
Pyne began using tempera as his primary medium in the mid-1960s and his longstanding experiments with indigenous powder pigments and various binding agents like gum acacia allowed him to develop a unique way of gradually building up surface and texture on canvas. Known for his meticulous draftsmanship and delicate handling of pigment, Pyne only finished about ten paintings a year. As spiritually demanding as it was physically, the artist’s practice frequently grappled with death and dystopia following his own early experiences of trauma and loss. His “work is often described as melancholic, with watery canvases depicting dark scenes of ghostly, skeletal figures and spindly vegetation. His figures populate the interstices between living and dead, mundane and otherworldly, present and past” (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India after Independence, New York, 2013, p. 170). Manipulating light and shadow with dexterity, Pyne’s paintings seem to emerge from these unexplored, interstitial spaces, simultaneously evoking balance and uncertainty, beauty and violence.
- Ella Datta, 1998
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the partition of the Indian Subcontinent, influenced Pyne to create visual narratives populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, an enigmatic painting from 1987 titled The Slave, Pyne offers what is likely an imaginative metaphor about the nature of modern life. Drawing on his experience creating characters for animated films in the early 1960s, the artist centers this painting on the anthropomorphic figure of a dog. Although the animal wears an elaborate gold crown and appears to be relaxing on a comfortable piece of upholstered furniture with its forelegs crossed in front of it, there is no escaping its blank stare, almost skeletal neck and torso, and the wide gold collar and leash that tethers it to a point beyond the frame. Seemingly content with the two bones that have been tossed to it, this macabre figure is also a dystopian one, representing the masses of people who remain unknowingly and slavishly trapped in the urban rat race. Although they may appear to be thriving, Pyne seems to suggest that this is only at the will of those who toss them bones, and their reality is a Pavlovian one, where constant repetition has dehumanized them.
Pyne began using tempera as his primary medium in the mid-1960s and his longstanding experiments with indigenous powder pigments and various binding agents like gum acacia allowed him to develop a unique way of gradually building up surface and texture on canvas. Known for his meticulous draftsmanship and delicate handling of pigment, Pyne only finished about ten paintings a year. As spiritually demanding as it was physically, the artist’s practice frequently grappled with death and dystopia following his own early experiences of trauma and loss. His “work is often described as melancholic, with watery canvases depicting dark scenes of ghostly, skeletal figures and spindly vegetation. His figures populate the interstices between living and dead, mundane and otherworldly, present and past” (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India after Independence, New York, 2013, p. 170). Manipulating light and shadow with dexterity, Pyne’s paintings seem to emerge from these unexplored, interstitial spaces, simultaneously evoking balance and uncertainty, beauty and violence.