Delhi Art Gallery presented an exhibition titled ‘Sublime Encounter’,which has artworks spanning four decades in different media by veteran artist Ambadas. Ambadas was born in India and has been living in Norway since 1972.  He is also the founder member of the much talked about rebellious group called ‘Group 1890’. 

In 1962, a group of artists came together in New Delhi with the aim of putting artists to ‘see phenomenon in their virginal state’. Styling themselves ‘Group 1890’, the artists once again renewed the century long discussion on artistic influence in Indian art. Their belief exposed that Indian artists must neither look to ‘memories of glorious past’, nor try to catch up with ‘artistic times’, to create an art.  They must begin on a clean slate, start from degree zero, so to say.

The main spirit behind the groups was J Swaminathan, an artist with leftist orientation. In a passionate manifesto, the group declared that they “reject the vulgar naturalism of Raja Ravi Varma and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal School, down through the hybrid mannerisms resulting from the imposition of the concepts evolved by successive movements in modern European art.”

Says Ashish Anand, Director, Delhi Art Gallery, “This exhibition takes the viewer through the decades that Ambadas has been consistently engaged with. He is among those artists who have much to contribute to the Indian contemporary art.”

In his works from the 70s and 80s, his oils had a dark and earthy feel about them.

The surface of the painting opened craters for the eye to enter into the interior of a womb. The dual forces of darkness and light, descension and ascension, veiling and unveiling, fear and hope were caught together in the creative moment.

His watercolours of 1970s exude the feeling of an unstructured terrain, a mysterious expanse, that holds many other worlds in it. Ambadas relishes being witness to colours, applied on a wet base, expand and stretch to make their own routes on the surface.

The ink leaves its mark as the body evaporates. What is achieved is a presence without a body. Touches of watercolours with fluorescent pink, reds and blues float to generate intricate patterns of vapours and vestiges.  Sometimes a flash of light electrifies the entire surface running across the canvas.

From the burdened impasto strokes of his early canvases, Ambadas has arrived at a lightness in the works done in the 1990s. However, this method is not so easy as the brush strokes never traverse in one direction, but move all over. The brush trembles and intermittently turns to draw sharp and shaky edges that undulate and often lose track.

Ambadas works with the unpredictability of the final image, oblivious to what will eventually emanate. What is most intriguing is the artists’ sensitive dialogue with medium and surface, resulting in emotions and texture difficult to achieve. The world becomes a floating structure and its reality transcends the rigidity of time and space.