At the 2023 India Art Fair we will be showing works from the Estates of Indian modernist artists Sadanand Bakre and Lancelot Ribeiro.
Booth A7
9 - 12 February 2023
Sadanand Bakre (1920 - 2007) is the lost Progressive. His personal life and his art were equally tragic.
Tragic in the sense that as a sculptor what works he did with the Progressive Group in the late 1940s before his departure for London have mostly been destroyed. The clay pieces would not have survived the punishing extremes of the heat and would have simply disintegrated over time.
When he reached London he struggled to find recognition and a gallery and what works he managed to make in bronze and metal would have been very expensive to make and so he had to fund himself. Without a gallery, he had to rely on his meagre salary as a hospital porter carrying bodies about. Nevertheless, he did it and had some exhibitions and made some very important and now rare pieces, some of these fortunately, have survived, but only a fraction of what he did, the majority are still lost, presumed destroyed. He had to turn to painting, a more commercial endeavour and with this, he had more success.
His return to India in 1975 was not as a hero but as a poor artist, which he remained until his death in 2007.
As a result of the scarcity of works, we have taken the decision to cast some of his sculptures in a posthumous edition just to allow what few sculptures remain to be preserved but also exhibited. These are all in a numbered edition of 6.
We hope that this rare publication of sculptures, drawings and paintings by Bakre will be the first of many and thus will begin his path to recognition.
Lancelot Ribeiro (1933 - 2010) is another artist who suffered mixed fortunes throughout his career. Born in Bombay in 1933 to a Catholic family from Goa, Ribeiro first came to Britain in 1950 to study accountancy and it was during this stay that his creative interests were kindled.
In 1960 he had a sell-out solo exhibition in the Bombay Art Society Salon. This led him to commit to painting. An early patron of his was Homi Bhabha, who bought and commissioned several works at the time. His exhibition at the Bombay Art Society was followed by five others in Bombay, New Delhi and Calcutta. In 1961, Ribeiro was included in the 'Ten Indian Painters' exhibition, followed by an extensive tour through India, Europe, the US and Canada.
In 1962 Ribeiro came to live in London on a permanent basis. He began by painting in traditional oils, incorporating elements of popular Indian graphic art along with touches of New York Abstract Expressionism and hints of Bernard Buffet's skeletal draughtsmanship.
In the 60s he experimented with synthetic plastic bases and began to paint in psychedelic PVA paint, which gave his work an 'other-worldly' feeling. A member of numerous Art Groups in London in the 60s and 70s, he continued to paint and exhibit in the UK and Europe.
Since his death in 2010, Ribeiro's life and work has undergone a reappraisal and numerous museum exhibitions have shown his work in a new light. Scholarship continues, putting Ribeiro amongst the most important Indian painters working in the UK in the late 20th century.
