Untitled

Prabhakar Barwe’s abstractionism was born out of his firm rejection of academic realism and India’s miniature tradition. He was inspired by the style of Bauhaus painter Paul Klee, which reflected in his watercolours, of which this Untitled work is an example. His lifelong engagement with objects and their relation to space is amply visible in this work, where an apple, some nails and other unidentifiable objects are examined in relation to their position with each other, and with the space that they jointly occupy. In doing so, Barwe forged a new enquiry in Indian modernism, making him a seminal modernist.