Prabhakar Barwe: Between Object and Space

Prabhakar Barwe (1936-95) could well have ended up a theoretician whose book, Kora Canvas (Blank Canvas) was a manifesto that established the multi-dimensional relationship between an artist, the object on which he paints, and his subjects. That he was not just an intellectual scholar but an artist whose work speaks for him, is evident through a range of works in which Barwe dissects our understanding of the world and how we view it. Taking commonplace objects and our perception of their existence in the space they occupy, he shifts the dialogue to a point of discomfiture that makes us question our understanding of them. Using scale, discordant juxtapositions, and displacements, he reimagines the everyday in a manner that is thought-provoking, even provocative, as alternate realities—whether perceived or imagined.

Barwe worked for some years with the Weavers’ Service Centre, allowing him the opportunity to travel through the country’s hinterlands where he found himself responding to sacred symbology. This led to designs for weavers and printers that assimilated these motifs as well as a larger exploration of tantra in his paintings for a brief while. Attracted to unconventional materials like enamel paint, Barwe’s bold experiments in surrealistic abstraction signified his pursuit of a new modern in which the artist and his choice of mediums and materials informed the making of an art practice of which he was a master.

This exhibition spans the gamut of Barwe’s interests across several decades of his practice and includes works on canvas as well as paper and textile—an intimate retrospective of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.