Lot 79: The Easel

Prabhakar Barwe (1936-1996)
The Easel
signed and dated in Devanagri; titled, dated and signed 'THE EASEL 1993 36" x 42" PRABHAKAR BARWE' (on the reverse)
enamel on canvas
35½ x 41 7/16in. (90.2 x 105.3cm.)
Painted in 1993

The Pop Art movement launched the banal objects of our everyday lives into the realm of fine art, asking the viewer to confront the soup can, the comic strip and newspaper clipping in monumental and very public ways. While the New York artists of the 1960s glorified the banal in large dramatic formats, Prabakhar Barwe's works are frank and candid, recreating the intimate environments that these items share with us in life. Explaining his choice of subject matter, Barwe states "However ordinary or commonplace it may look at first sight, if it is based on self experience and if it springs directly from the heart, it becomes self evident, a valid aesthetic experience in a work of art." Prabhakar Barwe, "Prabhakar Barwe," Spear Museum of Art, http://www.cyberadsstudio.com/SPEAR/bharve/index.shtml, (retrieved 10 February 2005).

Barwe's works employ the conceptual devices of Surrealism placing a series of simple objects and ephemeral shapes in an atypical composition. Painting a few isolated forms on a canvas, the artist allows each to exist in its own right, related to, but not disturbing, those around it. In understanding the mental processes leading to his finished canvases, the artist believes that the visual experience, created by concrete components which are synthesized within his abstract paintings, "is like a thought-free space of the mind, or like an undivided, unruffled mental state". According to the artist, concrete ideas may result in abstract forms in his paintings, or alternatively, abstract mental concepts may emerge in his work as a concrete form. He states "my effort is to examine how and where the concrete and the abstract meet in the course of such journeys." ( Prabhakar Barwe , Gallery Chemould, 1992, unpaginated).