Experiences of Grace , States of Illumination :
The Paintings of Jehangir Sabavala

Ranjit Hoskote

A portfolio is, literally, a collection of leaves that you can carry with you. The word is veined with the pleasures of selecting a favourite image, dwelling on an intriguing detail, juxtaposing images from different periods in an artist’s career to produce a visual narrative that is richly multi-dimensional. Like a miniature retrospective, a suite of limited edition serigraphs such as the present one, can represent the entire gamut of an artist’s contribution and evoke the span of his artistic career. The images that comprise this selection demonstrate the inner logic of Jehangir Sabavala’s aesthetic
development and the changing nature of his responses to the complexities of self, society, ethnic ancestry and artistic context.

A prominent member of the first generation of postcolonial Indian artists, Sabavala is one of the pioneers who first developed a painterly idiom that was attuned to the international languages of art-making yet sensitive to the textures of local culture and visual capability. The present images stand in an intriguing relationship to the paintings on which they are based: they are not exact reproductions, but have been slightly modified by the artist through digital means, in consultation with the Serigraph Studio, the final images being produced by the screen-printing technique. The accelerated growth of the Indian art market during the last few years, welcomes it from an economic as well as a cultural viewpoint, has tended to put the works of modern masters like Sabavala beyond the reach of many serious collectors. In such a situation, initiatives such as this limited edition serve to present a novel form of image, to amplify the ongoing conversation about Indian art, and to expand the collector base that sustains this domain of imagemaking activity.