Virén Sahai, Evening Light (1966): The Friday Find

"I do not want to be in the heat of art movement worries and cliques…"

 

A sentiment we can all agree with??

 

Virén Sahai is an artist that many will not be acquainted with. He is however an interesting and well exhibited abstract painter and architect, who lived and worked in the UK from the mid-1950s onwards, exhibiting in London, Paris and Europe.

His early life and artistic career is well documented in a 1968 Lalit Kala article titled; A Passage from India – Seven Painters in London, which included texts on Balraj Khanna, Avinash Chandra and Sadanand Bakre - this incidentally comes from the excellent website 'Critical Collective'.

 

“After leaving school, he worked as a draughtsman in Delhi and then in Rangoon, Burma. He saved up for the passage to Britain, where he arrived in 1955 with nothing but a letter of introduction to an architectural practice in London. He worked during the day and finished his architectural training in the evenings.”

He also continued his artistic practice, painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the late 1950s.

He is best known as an architect, and spent his early career working for Fry, Drew and Partners as site architect on the Ahmadu Bello Stadium in Nigeria – the same Fry and Drew that worked with Le Corbusier and an Indian team of architects and designers to build Chandigarh.

This excerpt from Lalit Kala Contemporary in 1968 describes his artistic practice:

 

"During the early 1960s his paintings become less descriptive, and, as the iconography blurs, the painterly concern increases dash a greater emphasis is placed on the marks themselves rather than what they are capable of depicting.

 

The majority of the image is determined by the medium itself, for example, the frost like patterns which float away from any stroke. One could predict the final form of his oil painting but the watercolours have an autonomy which is unpredictable in their organic growth.”

Lalit Kala Contemporary, Volume 9, September 1968

 

He also exhibited at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, famous for exhibiting the work of artists from South Asia, including Tyeb Mehta, Ivan Peries, FN Souza etc.

Whilst he is not well known, the continuous research into the work and life of artists from South Asia in Britain in the mid-20^th century carries on a pace, and it is only a matter of time until his output is properly evaluated.

 

Charles Moore