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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.
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