Amitava Das has created an abstract language for himself, but will it mark the transition of his work from the collector to the investor?
At first glance they resemble doodles more than high art, but let those images scorch into your consciousness. Like the distinctive styles some artists have managed to create for themselves, Amitava Das’s articulated beings bear his unique stamp and the promise of longevity painted into them. The Delhi-based Amitava (he does not like using his surname), whose exhibition opens at Sakshi in Mumbai this week, has so far managed to keep a middling profile, which is what makes him investment worthy according to those who have been following his career in the last decade.
An artist’s prices are lowest before he enters the secondary market, and Amitava has still to make that leap, and whenever that happens, it will establish him as an important player among the country’s contemporary painters. Not that Amitava is cheap even now — prices in the primary market are in the range of Rs 12-16 lakh for his larger canvases (and at six-and-a-half feet they are huge), smaller works commanding between Rs 4-7 lakh, and his small pen, ink and watercolour drawings mostly affordable at or around Rs 1.25 lakh. Mostly his absence from the secondary bazaar is because he hasn’t been collected by investors who have tended to recycle him for a fast buck — that in all likelihood will happen when a burst of his works appear in auction catalogues. Because the entry level prices are still modest, there is a chance that at least a few collectors are hoarding his work, but for most part Amitava’s acrylic canvases are spread across collectors for whom he fills a gap in their quest to have a complete trajectory of Indian art.
What would help his market, too, would be a more vigorous debate around Amitava’s work. Even for those familiar with his style, variously described as abstract expressionism, even symbolist expressionism, the immediate association could be with primitivism — certainly, the stippling and use of dots and lines appears to be a reference towards it. Yet, Amitava’s journey towards it has followed a journey which began with flat colours (something to which he has stayed true) with the truncated heads and dismembered limbs of the seventies giving way to distorted figures in the eighties and then becoming increasingly abstracted in the nineties.
For those unfamiliar with his story, Amitava grew up in Shimla and Delhi and found himself rejecting a conventional course in college for studies and a career in art, including its teaching. Among his influences even then were Western artists from George Braque and Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, and in India he was inspired by and friends with J Swaminathan and Manjit Bawa, Tyeb Mehta and G R Santosh, Himmat Shah and Krishen Khanna. As he honed his own style further, a duality of images began to enter his canvases, an exterior/interior, real/mirrored, surface/inside juxtaposition that has continued to govern his imagery. Over the years, his colours have become more intense and the similies more graphic, while black and white has come to dominate his more recent canvases to the exclusion of almost any other colour.
As much in transition as his change as an artist, Amitava too has been moulting, and a new creature is emerging on his canvas. That it probably holds the secret to the painter’s market index in the new decade is something one can count on.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
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