Kora Canvas 2

Prabhakar Barwe, the reticent abstractionist, was perhaps the only artist of his generation who articulated the process of his painting in words, through the book, Kora Canvas. The work in consideration here bears the same title and is a slow yet progressive absorption in the process of understanding abstraction. By turning the apple—as also its shadow—to ninety degrees, he displaces the understanding of gravity in the viewer’s mind and leads it further to understand the object’s relation with space. In doing so, the artist lets us in on his lifelong exploration of a space-object interconnection, which was also a hallmark of his language of abstraction.