Akbar Padamsee

Akbar Padamsee grew up in Bombay in a Khoja Muslim family; his father was a businessman. As a boy he copied pictures from The Illustrated Weekly of India into his father’s account books at the family shop on Chakla Street. He went on to the Sir J. J. School of Art. The Progressive Artists’ Group was formed in 1947 while he was still a student, and by the time he graduated he was part of its circle.

In 1951 he followed S. H. Raza to Paris, where Krishna Reddy introduced him to Stanley William Hayter and his print studio, Atelier 17. He first exhibited in Paris in 1952 and held his first solo show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1954. He returned to India for good in the late 1960s.

His subjects were few and he kept returning to them: heads, nudes, landscapes. The landscapes became the Metascapes, built from colour and a private logic of form. He drew portraits in pencil and charcoal, made black-and-white photographs, and later tried computer graphics.

Around 1969 and 1970 he made two short 16mm films. Syzygy is an animation of lines and dots worked out from a set of rules, an early cousin of generative art. Events in a Cloud Chamber, with a soundtrack by Geeta Sarabhai, was misplaced after a few screenings in 1970, and no copy survives. In 2016 Ashim Ahluwalia made a new film of the same name with him, which opened at Venice.

He helped shape the collection at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal and received the Padma Bhushan in 2010. He died in 2020, aged 91.