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Homage to Solzhenitsyn is an epic landscape of fantastical proportion. With rolling hills of blue, amber and purple set against a bright yellow sky, this painting is nature in the sunlight, its beauty cascading in all directions. Painted in the early years of the Bird and Mountain series, Homage to Solzhenitsyn is imbued with an enthusiastic spirit that highlights its innovative and transcendent methodology. Unseen since its acquisition, this work is a discovery piece and the largest in the series to ever come to the market. Dedicated to Russian author andꦿ activist Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn who was sentenced to the gulag for eight years, this homage is a symbol of hope and growth in the face of adversity.

Swaminathan started painting in Delhi in 1955, pivoting from a career in journalism and other political activities in the city. He studied art at Delhi Polytechnic and won a scholarship to continue studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1958, but he returned shortly thereafter and instead trained as Sailoz Mookherjea’s apprentice. From these early years as an artist, Swaminathan engaged with the growing arts community. Swaminathan’s home and studio became an informal salon where young artists could discuss a🌸rt, politics, philosophy and beyond.

Swaminathan’s embeddednꦍess and interest in the trajectory of Indian art led to t🥂he formation of Group 1890 in 1962. Taking a more political stance, the group’s origins lie in Swaminathan’s discontent with the dualism that existed in the country’s art scene, with artists privileging either European or Indian folk associations to portray the Indian modern aesthetic. Joined by artists Jeram Patel, Raghav Kaneria, M. Reddeppa Naidu, Ambadas Khobragade, Rajesh Mehra, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah, S.G. Nikam, Eric Hubert Bowen, Jyoti Bhatt and Balkrishna Patel, the collective sought to define modern art in India by producing their own unique visual languages. This idea, arising from many of Swaminathan’s critiques and writings from this period, was completely revolutionary for the time.

Group 1890’s manifesto, written by Swaminathan, rejects hybridity, a term which had pervaded Indian modern art from as early on as master Raja Ravi Varma. Rather than promoting any kind of identity, the manifesto prioritizes a state of flux where art exists on i▨ts own and as its own experience. In its 🌠first few paragraphs, Swaminathan clarifies the intention of the movement.

Though the movement lasted only a year, it had a tremendous impact on the Swaminathan’s own work. The artist translated the pursuit of a ‘reality itself. a whole new world of experience,' a fundamental idea of Group 1890, and these new realities manifested from the artist’s experiment with geometry and pure color known as the Colour Geometry of Space (mid-1960s) to the Bird and Mountain series (1968-early 1990s). Swaminathan’s oeuvreღ captures the essence of the movement: to let art speak for itself.

In 1968, Swaminathan began a decades-long focus on depicting cosmological landscapes, rearranging mountains, trees, rocks, bodies of water, seeds and birds to create new universes. He used these elements to represent the infinite, rather than their defined purpose in nature, and searched for a deeper meaning. In interviews from 1973-74, the same year Homage to Solzhenitsyn was painted, the artist outlined his symbology.

Throughout the 70s, Swaminathan developed the Bird and Mountain series and this su🗹stained interest in the subject led to its quick🅺 advancement. Many of these works were exhibited early on, including the exhibition of the present lot in a single painting show at Dhoomimal Gallery. The next year, the Gallery held a solo show of the series in 1975, and these works were understood, critically at least, as both tied to the natural environment and distinct from the real world.

The contemporary and ancient human coexist in the series, a way of simultaneously looking back and toward the future. As a young boy, Swaminathan drew and painted the landscapes around him, having grown up in Shimla and finding inspiration in Himachal Pradesh’s lush environment in his early yeꦰars. These works are a return to nature as a mode to experience reality, deriving its strength from the innate and undeniable link between humans and their environment.

To achieve the mesmerizing image of this world beyond, Swaminathan also explores the spatial relationship between the objects and their shading. He paints balanced compositions, di𓆉viding the canvas into brigh🔯t color fields and interspersing natural elements in a quasi-symmetrical way. Indian miniature paintings also inspired the artist, as his pigments and compositions evoke the way Pahari miniatures showed the pure mysticism and luminosity of natural world.

Through color, composition and elements, the Bird and Mountain series shows a respect for nature as a guide to a mystifying universe whose potential is unrealized and hidden. Swaminathan painted 𓂃pictorial maps designed to see the world in different ways, dematerializing images from nature and infusing them with infinite meaning. Regardless of the intentional ambiguities, paintings from this series masterfully resonate order and serenity, capturing a simplicity and peace that became emblematic of these works. The artist’s truth was that the only truth is illusion.

Stretching 13 ½ feet wide, Homage to Solzhenitsyn is a monumental example of the Bird and Mountain series. This resplendent landscape most fully imparts Swaminathan’s painterly expression of the sublime, providing a panoramic view of the world to experience on canvas. As 💛a tribute to a brave Russian author and activist, the work embodies the words of truth and the legacy of hope that he carried after years of oppression.

Rolling gold, purple and green hills are backlit by a shining yellow sky, alluding to a sunny day. Puddles of white and lime green spill over the landscape, floating between spaces and in their flatness, a depth that emphasizes the dimensionality of the composition. Mirrored in the canvas are six blue-purple orbs accompanied by Swaminathan’s characteristic angled bird, suspended in flight. These birds rotate bet𒐪ween marbled and matte colors in a mirrored effect, imbuing the canvas with a sense of motion and dynamic change. The artist plays with the harmony of his objects by reflecting them throughout the composition while also subverting the idea with multi-directional mounds, birds and pools.

At the center of the work is a blooming tree with thinly painted branches covered in rosy pink buds. The lush plant adds a unique, uplifting joy to the canvas, symbolizing the hope of a new day as its branches grow in praise of Solzhenitsyn and his formidable history of activism. Sentenced to eight years in the gulag for his criticism of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn is known for the moral stature in his life and work as well as raising awareness of the atrocities taking place in the Soviet Union. His most widely read books include A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973), both of which de🌄tail life in the labor camps with the author’s critical humanity and care for the victims. Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to truth and justice transcended his own life and into his award-winning writing. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the ethical force𝓀 with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.’ (‘Nobel Prize in Literature 1970’, The Nobel Prize, nobelprize.org)

With Swaminathan’s devoted political background, especially in his early years, the activist greatly inspired him enough so to create perhaps the most epic rendition of birds, trees and mountains. The present lot not only honors Solzenitsyn’s personal and literary achievements but also highlights the power of international exchange and the ideas that traveled between dissidents – both artistic and political – on a global scale. Though the painting is abstract, its grandiosity is real; it is truly a worthy tribute from one great thinker and writer to another. Homage to Solzhenitsyn memorializes Swaminath๊an and Solzhenitsyn’s indefatigable search for truth in the radiant colors and commanding size that it deserves.