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拍品专文
Shanti Dave, born in 1931 in Gujarat, is a revolutionary artist amongst the early modernists of the Baroda School. Starting out painting signboards in Ahmedabad, Dave refined his understanding and technical abilities at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, where he studied under artists including N.S. Bendre and K.G. Subramanyan.
This artistic milieu, which Dave emerged from, embraced indigenous and regional influences from art and philosophy in the search for a uniquely Indian modernism, allowing artists significant freedom in their methodologies. In this environment, “Dave turned very early to the idea of abstraction, unlike many other Indian artists who arrived at it gradually. Rejecting the idea of abstraction drawn from nature’s visual impression, Dave plunged himself into the abstract idea of the unstruck sound that gave birth to nature” (J. Thacker ed., Shanti Dave: Neither Earth Nor Sky, New Delhi, 2023, p. 23).
For Dave, the letter or akshara, is an elemental building block of the material world and an immutable truth outside of linear time represented by spoken syllables and written characters. The incorporation of calligraphy into his works allows Dave to explore the relationship between sound, colour, speech, temporality and form, allowing for a synthesis of these into meaning. The reliefs in the present lot, a monumental mixed media work on canvas by the artist, feature text in intentionally indecipherable Tibetan script alongside Buddhist imagery, meant to mimic tsa tsa moulds, as well as phrases in Japanese. In the late 1960s, Dave studied the use of encaustics and East Asian calligraphy under the tutelage of a Japanese artist. He immediately began incorporating this new medium into his works on canvas, finding that it suited him well. “Encaustic is not for everyone. For me, however, it gave me immense satisfaction...I could achieve so much more in art through perfecting this process” (J. Thacker ed., Ibid., p. 18).
The execution of Dave’s works from this period required careful pouring, sculpting and carving of hot beeswax and oil on the canvas to create the richly textured blocks we see in the present lot. By inscribing these characters by hand, itself an age-old meditative practice, Dave reasserts the moral relevancy and timelessness of these Buddhist themes while participating in the reproduction of the ‘word’, and as such the material world. The slabs of text, interspersed with deities, appear to float above the yellow and brown space-time. The forms maintain continuity with each other as they flow organically through this liminal space along a curved, perhaps cyclical, path. The fields of light and dark, smooth and textured in the present lot give visual life to the energy and vibrations, audible and inaudible, that are, in a Vedic cosmology, responsible for all creation. It was through works like this lot that “Dave’s architectonics of form, colour and sound was making its space within the conceptual framework of Indian abstraction” (J. Thacker ed., Ibid., p. 28).
This artistic milieu, which Dave emerged from, embraced indigenous and regional influences from art and philosophy in the search for a uniquely Indian modernism, allowing artists significant freedom in their methodologies. In this environment, “Dave turned very early to the idea of abstraction, unlike many other Indian artists who arrived at it gradually. Rejecting the idea of abstraction drawn from nature’s visual impression, Dave plunged himself into the abstract idea of the unstruck sound that gave birth to nature” (J. Thacker ed., Shanti Dave: Neither Earth Nor Sky, New Delhi, 2023, p. 23).
For Dave, the letter or akshara, is an elemental building block of the material world and an immutable truth outside of linear time represented by spoken syllables and written characters. The incorporation of calligraphy into his works allows Dave to explore the relationship between sound, colour, speech, temporality and form, allowing for a synthesis of these into meaning. The reliefs in the present lot, a monumental mixed media work on canvas by the artist, feature text in intentionally indecipherable Tibetan script alongside Buddhist imagery, meant to mimic tsa tsa moulds, as well as phrases in Japanese. In the late 1960s, Dave studied the use of encaustics and East Asian calligraphy under the tutelage of a Japanese artist. He immediately began incorporating this new medium into his works on canvas, finding that it suited him well. “Encaustic is not for everyone. For me, however, it gave me immense satisfaction...I could achieve so much more in art through perfecting this process” (J. Thacker ed., Ibid., p. 18).
The execution of Dave’s works from this period required careful pouring, sculpting and carving of hot beeswax and oil on the canvas to create the richly textured blocks we see in the present lot. By inscribing these characters by hand, itself an age-old meditative practice, Dave reasserts the moral relevancy and timelessness of these Buddhist themes while participating in the reproduction of the ‘word’, and as such the material world. The slabs of text, interspersed with deities, appear to float above the yellow and brown space-time. The forms maintain continuity with each other as they flow organically through this liminal space along a curved, perhaps cyclical, path. The fields of light and dark, smooth and textured in the present lot give visual life to the energy and vibrations, audible and inaudible, that are, in a Vedic cosmology, responsible for all creation. It was through works like this lot that “Dave’s architectonics of form, colour and sound was making its space within the conceptual framework of Indian abstraction” (J. Thacker ed., Ibid., p. 28).