Lot 50: Untitled

BAL CHHABDA (1923-2013) Untitled signed 'Bal' and inscribed 'Bal Chhabda Darshan Apts Malabar Hill Mumbai - 6 India' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 51 x 81 in. (129.5 x 205.7 cm.) Painted circa 1970s

129.5 x 205.7 cm.

circa 1970

New York, Tamarind Art Gallery, 50 Years of Bal Chhabda: Paintings in New York, May-June 2006

50 years of Bal Chhabda: Paintings in New York, Tamarind Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, New York, p. 14 (illustrated)

Formerly in the collection of the artist

Bal Chhabda is an unsung figure in the story of Indian Modernism. He became a close friend and contemporary of the Progressive Artists' Group in Mumbai, after a chance meeting with M.F. Husain in the early 1950s. Through Husain and their visits to the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, Chhabda soon met and befriended Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna and V.S. Gaitonde among others. Like Mehta, he had a background in film making and it was not until Husain and Gaitonde encouraged him to paint in 1958 that he actually embarked on a career as an artist. A year later, Chhabda founded Gallery 59, which went on to hold cornerstone exhibitions for his contemporaries. His work was greeted with critical acclaim as he participated in exhibitions in India and internationally, including the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Paris, and the Tokyo Biennale, in 1960. The present canvas typifies the bold abstraction of Chhabda's paintings, with its congregation of figures that have a monolithic quality. The execution, where figures are suggested through areas of space and symphonic colour rather than line, almost looks like a negative photograph. Chhabda was very much an 'artist's artist' celebrated by his colleagues, and a pivotal figure with and without the brush within Indian Modernism.