The artist as a poet

Prabhakar Barwe is that rare artist whose work defies description and cannot be easily slotted under a convenient label

A quiet and wonderful revolution has taken root in the world of Indian art — the unheralded re-discovery of Indian masters lost to the mists of time whose work is being realised and celebrated by curators questioning their absence from the mainstream narrative. And an excellent example of this is Prabhakar Barwe whose Mumbai retrospective, Inside the Empty Box, has now travelled to New Delhi in the form of Astitva: The Essence of Prabhakar Barwe. Curated by Jesal Thacker at the National Gallery of Modern Art, the exhibition is an eye-opener too for the number of institutions and private collectors who have loaned works to provide an overarching view of the artist’s astounding oeuvre.

Barwe is that rare artist whose work defies description and cannot be easily slotted under a convenient label. Born in 1936, familiar with the world of sculpting and a student of the J J School of Art in Bombay, Barwe joined the Weavers’ Service Centre in 1961, giving up the comfort of a salary only in 1982 to spend his remaining years till 1995 as a professional artist. But these barebones of a profile shed no light on an artist who treated his art with the precision of an architect. His treatment of line, light and object was deliberate, unseating convention and causing the viewer no little disorientation — and amusement. For, his shadows would be contrarily wrongly positioned, the surreal displacement of objects intended to surprise us into accepting alternate perspectives.

Prabhakar Barwe’s Albhabets of Nature, enamel on canvas, 1988

Barwe’s work is often positioned as autobiographical in as much as a survey of mundane objects can be autobiographical — clocks, watches, a bowl of fruit, his favourite apple, safety pins, hangers, a vase or sewing machine, juxtaposed without any seeming relationship with each other or their size. Almost from the start, he chose to eliminate the figure from his paintings, objectifying, instead, the banal that he turned heroic by the simple method of reproducing its image on his canvas. By the mid-’70s, space played as important a role in his work as the objects he painted. Haiku-like, he eliminated all that he considered inessential resulting in what Geeta Kapur called “spatial buoyancy” and painter Gulammohammed Sheikh saw as a “free association of images”. 

Barwe was a diarist too who has left behind exhaustive notes on art as well as on the “conflict between visual concepts and literary ideas” (Dilip Ranade), and his writings are exemplary instances of his thinking. Unlike several of his peers, Barwe was quick to experiment, painting on silk and wood, playing with textures, working with matchsticks and playing cards. His early stint in Banaras with the Weavers’ Service Centre had exposed him to both temple architecture and tantra, and found expression in the circle and triangle that afforded him fascination for a while. He used enamel paint at a time when its use was purely industrial. 

The Barwe retrospective may have been overdue coming but it sheds welcome light on an Indian artist working his way through aspects of art practice that he first encountered as a student intrigued by Germany’s Bauhaus expression. Sublimated in the subconscious along with his father’s interest in astrology, they metamorphosed in Barwe’s language and art-making in ways not easy to recognise. In recent years, art lovers have been demanding to know more about this ignored artist about whom Chaitanya Sambrani writes: “He had that rare ability to convey through his words those revelatory leaps of the imagination that can transcend the limitations of prescriptive meaning to reach into the unknown, to cull from those realms nuggets of insight that would challenge the intellect: Barwe could make you think like an artist, a poet.” Barwe has brought both poetry and meaning into our lives as viewers.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated