Garden

Upon graduating from Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, V. S. Gaitonde began his career with figurative work, superlative examples of which, however, remain overshadowed by the monumentality of his later-day abstraction. However, within the first decade of his career, Gaitonde was moving towards semi-abstraction, where forms were dissolving into an amorphous landscape of colour. This lithograph, titled Garden, is an example of this intermittent phase, marked by semi-abstract art with a certain animation, in total contrast to his forays into silence through an earthy palette in his later, life-defining ‘non-representative’ phase—a term he preferred over abstraction.