Mohan Samant: Various works (1980–1998)

Overview

Mohan Samant was an early modernist painter whose practice has remained largely unnoticed. In 1952, Samant joined the Progressive Artists Group, a collective of artists predominantly based in Bombay (now Mumbai), before breaking away to travel, from Egypt to the United States, where he ultimately settled until his death.

Unsettled Objects features seven of Samant’s works on both canvas and paper across a period of 20 years. These works illustrate his experiments with mythological tradition as they interface with his pursuits of abstraction and figuration. Infused with pictorial representations of daily life as well as spiritual motifs, the works shown here are representative of an idiom that breaks away from what was being produced by his peers at the time.