laxman shreshtha

Laxman Shreshtha was born in Siraha, Nepal in 1939. He graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay in 1962. In 1964 he received a French Government Scholarship to Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris. In 1970 he received the British Council Grant to the Central School of Art and Craft, London and in 1971 was awarded the I.V.P. Grant by the U.S. Government to visit Baltimore and San Francisco.

Soon after graduating he held his first solo exhibition in Bombay-1963 and Khatmandu-1964. He has been invited to participate in exhibitions at Maison des Beaux Arts and Sal de la Press, Paris-1966; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh-1979; Gallery Surya, Freinsheim and Gallery F. Friendrich, Cologne, Germany-1980; Gallery Maison Fracaise, Nairobi, Kenya-1987; ‘Pioneers to the New Generation’, Calcutta-1992; ‘The Search Within’ an Austro-Indian traveling exhibition, Pernegg Monastery, Geras and Bildungshaus St. Virgil, Salzburg, Austria, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi and Bombay -1998-99.

Shreshtha's abstract works are both sensuous and meditative in their shifts and balances of colour. Sometimes echoing the mountain peaks of his native Katmandu, the pristine white light of rarefied heights sears through the dense opacity of colour creating dazzling effects. One can observe a palpable movement from chaos to spiritual peace, in his work. Shreshtha's canvases are an intermingling of vivid browns, yellows, reds, oranges and blues. These capture and emote passions dramatically, whether these passions are brooding, fierce or cheerful. His work is intricately related to the events in his life and the struggles he has had to face. His journey, from being a member of an aristocratic family in Nepal, to a struggling art student on the brink of starvation, made him embark on a spiritual quest, which has been reflected in his work He looked for answers to his early existentialist dilemmas in books on Western philosophy. Later he turned to the Upanishads and to Buddhism. His paintings are a reflection of these experiences. Though abstract, his paintings have a sense of intrigue in them, that leaves the observer, and Shreshtha himself, as he confesses, trying to understand the shades of meaning they present.

“Without realising it you begin to breath more deeply before Laxman Shreshtha's new paintings many of them large diptychs whose overwhelming scale and splendor compel a bodily response. Their basic vocabulary is conservative, not experimental: high ridges and valley slopes torched by the sun, sharp crevasses and abysses rimmed by empty sky. But soaked in restless, radiant colour and refined to notation of force, these landscapes achieve the intensity of invocation; become a hymnal refrain of mountains, a celebration of infinitude. Laxman Shreshtha has stepped out of the slow road into the hills that he has walked for nearly a decade; past forms suggestive of pellucid lakes and isolated woods surmounted by clouds. Towards the end that walk had become ritual, formulaic in its gestures; and it is as well that Shreshtha has changed direction.

Currents of resurgent energy now course through his pigment; the canvasses crackle with the friction of planes shifting against one another. And you, as you view this topography, find no position from which to parachute down into vistas that recede, only to forcefully re-assert themselves. Indeed, these perspectives are often so precariously projected, that ideally, the viewer ought to adopt a hovering stance to do them justice. And then, the ranged horizons appear, not as forbidding palisades but as presence's splintered by the sky's weight avalanching their freight of sienna and amber towards the foreground, towards the eye.” – Ranjit Hoskote

Shreshtha lives and works in Mumbai.