About Akbar Padamsee

Born in 1928 in Mumbai, Padamsee studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art, before going to Paris and then to New York in 1965 on a Fellowship from the J.D. Rockefeller Foundation. Throughout his illustrious career spanning six decades, he has remained fiercely experimental and individualistic. Padamsee's forms bounded by the line and created from an assemblage of strokes on the surface are both real and transcendent. If the forms carry an expression of ineffable sadness, there are periods when he paints landscapes which express the grandeur of infinite time.

He was invited to be an artist in residence at the Stout Statue University, Wisconsin. His works have a metaphysical presence owing to his belief and practise of the Indian RASA theory of aesthetics. He also held an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal. In, 1969, he received the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship and participated in several of the International Triennales in India and the Biennales of Sao Paola, Brazil, Tokyo and Venice and with many prominent national and international art galleries. He has participated in exhibitions and Biennales – Venice, 1953 and 1955; Sao Paulo and Tokyo in 1959; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1981; Royal Academy of Arts, London 1982 and National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, 1985. He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Kalidas Samman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1997 and the ‘Padma Bhushan’ by the Government of India in 2010. Padamsee lives and works in Mumbai.