Though Ambadas, the veteran Indian artist has been visiting India every year, but this January, it is his retrospective at the Delhi Art Gallery showcasing his works of the last four decades and the release of his book sublime encounters: ambadas (1965-2005) that brings him to New Delhi. A pioneering figure of modernism in India and a founder member of the much talked about rebellious group called GROUP 1890, Ambadas and his fellow artists motivated by the ideologue and guiding spirit of 1890, J. Swaminathan, questioned the tired and conventional ways of art practice, wanting to explore new trajectories and invent a modernist language that rejected the imitation of past Indian styles as well as the blind derivatives of the West, to dip into the inner resources of their own being.
From the very inception of his art practice, Ambadas’s chosen trajectory dismissed the trappings of the external world. Driven by the wellsprings of his subconscious, Ambadas admits he was always in search of something that transcended the visible and recognisable. As one of the pioneering artists who initiated the possibilities of the non-representational genre of painting in India, he is quite unlike his contemporaries who either shifted from abstraction to figuration or vice versa. “I always intended to do away with every intention in my work”. In case of Ambadas and his art, it is easier to write of ‘what it is not’ rather than ‘what it is’.

Undoubtedly, Ambadas stands apart from all his fellow companions/ contemporaries working within the non-representational genre. Neither is his art a reduction of observed phenomenon nor a deductive process. In fact, if anything, it addresses form “prior to manifestation”. Biren De’s (1926) iconic symbolism defied movement and calmed the human eye and soul and G. R. Santosh chose the neo-tantric mode based on the primordial purush-prakriti union. While V. S. Gaitonde’s large, planar surfaces distilled with subtle layers of paint create a meditative silence out of translucent beams of light, the paintings of Ambadas are filled with a raw, explosive energy that occupies each and every corner of the pictorial space. The abstruse nature of his work makes it unproblematic to discuss the formal appearance of his painting which, one would agree has deeper implications for the artist to pursue it over fifty years.
At 85, Ambadas continues to feel nomadic; still wandering like a sage, his art bears testimony to his state of being. Born in India and having resided in Norway since 1972, he has precariously relocated himself in an in-between space, a buffer zone between the two places, two cultures and two world-views. The conflicting emotions associated with physical migration and spiritual resistance has at times made it hard for his spirit and form to adjust to one another. Often disoriented within his own spaces of the everyday, he lives secluded and almost reclusively in the old and beautiful Norwegian house that faces a boulevard. His typical far-away yet inward looking expression forced me to ask myself whether the change of place, location and cultural environment has had a drastic effect on his work. Or even more, whether the local/regional/national aspects had ever impacted his art or its ideology. Had Ambadas shifted gears and changed tracks after he migrated to Norway?