Aicon is pleased to announce Archaeologist at the Ancient City, a retrospective of the late Mohan Samant (1924-2004). The exhibition charts his dynamic practice from the early 1960s through 2003 with examples of his heavily textured surfaces from the 1960s and 70s, three-dimensional paper cut-outs starting in 1975, intricately hand-bent wire figures and cut niches that appeared in the 1980s, and finally, the expert melding of these canvas expanding processes in the 1990s and 2000s. Alongside important canvases highlighting Samant’s unique idiom is a collection of watercolor-based works on paper from the 80s and 90s. Archaeologist at the Ancient City is presented in collaboration with Jillian Samant and Abraham Joel. 

Mohan (Manmohan) Balkrishna Samant was born into a middle-class family in a suburb of Bombay in 1924. Samant started playing the sarangi during high school and would go on to practice the instrument every day before painting. In 1947 he enrolled at the Sir J.J. School of Art, the same year several of its students formed the famed Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), a band of artists who revolted against the nationalism of the Bengal school and pushed for an Indian avant-garde. Samant would join the group in 1952, the same year he received his diploma. He participated in the final PAG exhibition in 1953 alongside modern masters like Gaitonde, Husain, and Khanna. 

Samant received a Rockefeller fellowship and came to New York City in February 1959. Thomas Kheen included four of his paintings in the groundbreaking group exhibition Trends in Contemporary Painting from India, which started at the Graham Gallery on Madison Avenue and then traveled across the States. Samant found success in the US in the early 1960s with his paintings entering major collections like those of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and George Montgomery (of the Asia Society). In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his painting Green Square (1963). Samant returned to Bombay in 1964 but would return to New York permanently in 1968.

The 1970s and 80s marked a pivotal time in Samant’s experiments with integrating new mediums. By 1975, he began incorporating paper cut-outs into his compositions. Samant would paint and draw with watercolor and felt-tip markers on paper and then cut out the resulting shapes from the background to form a three-dimensional scene that he would glue to painted supports and affix to the canvas. The results were akin to miniature theater stages, an apt comparison given the artist’s interest in the leather-puppet theatre of Andhra Pradesh and wayang (shadow-puppets) of Indonesia. Both the titular work of this exhibition and Killing of the Mythical Bird (1980) are stunning examples of Samant’s cut-outs. 

The artist’s use of heavily textured surfaces was the impetus for using wire forms and recessed panels. Having incorporated materials such as sand since the 1960s—see the rough edges of Untitled, c. 1963—Samant realized that he would need to use new methods to create finely detailed images. When asked why he used bent wires for his figures, Samant explained, “I gave this young artist a pencil and asked him to draw on the rough wall outside the gallery so he would understand how the wire drawings work on a heavily textured canvas. He realized he couldn’t draw a fine line on the rough wall.”1 Mexican Wine Party (1982) is an early example of Samant’s wire drawings, which highlights how the wire figures help unite disparate areas of the canvas by overlapping different blocks of color. This painting also clearly shows the influence of Basholi and Jain miniatures as well as the Buddhist murals of the Ajanta caves seen throughout much of his practice. 

Starting around 1987, Samant modified his small toy figurine application from friezes to niches carved into the canvas. One of Samant’s first recessed canvases, Mrutya Smruti: Dance for the Ancestors (1987), is included in the exhibition. In the largest panel is an ancient burial site with several skeletons exhumed to various degrees; it is as if the spirits of these bodies are dancing across the canvas as bent-wire figures. The use of figurines to create tableaux reference Samant’s frequent childhood visits to museums like the Victoria & Albert Museum (now Bhau Daji Lad Museum) in Bombay where he saw countless dioramas portraying Indian village life.

For a more holistic view of Samant’s practice, Archaeologist at the Ancient City includes a selection of works on paper. While Samant used watercolors throughout his career, he turned to the medium with increased vigor in 1974 after a heart attack left him unable to work on large-scale canvases. He played with texture by adding linear patterns with felt-tip marker and cut-paper appliques to layers of transparent watercolor. He had another period of exceptional watercolor output in the 1990s. Works such as The Gossipers (1998) show Samant’s deft hand mixing delicate washes of color with swaths of opaque paint and felt-tip marker embellishments. 

Archaeologist at the Ancient City (2003) is among one of Samant’s final works. In this extraordinary canvas, we see how the artist revisited themes and techniques that spanned his career. From vibrant color-field backgrounds to watercolor paper cut-outs, from textured art-brut-like surfaces to delicately lined figures, this painting weaves together art historical citations and Indian-inspired allegories to create what Ranjit Hoskote called a “one-man avant-garde.”2 Samant was a transcultural artist who absorbed the visual complexities of Hindu temples, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and pre-Columbian ceramics, to name a few, and combined them with references to European artists like Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso to create an endlessly developing style that was all his own.  

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Mohan Samant (b. Bombay, 1924; d. New York City, 2004) was an early Indian modernist painter and a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). He received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1952. Samant had several solo shows with his New York representative, World House Galleries, and was included in major group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1956), the touring Trends in Contemporary Painting From India (1959-60), Contemporary Indian Painting 1973 (1973, Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.), Contemporary Indian Art (1982, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK), and The Progressive Revolution (2019, Asia Society, New York). In addition to his art practice, Samant was a skilled musician who favored the sarangi (an Indian bowed instrument). He often held concerts in his Flatiron loft with his wife, musician Jillian Samant. Samant’s artworks are held in prestigious collections including the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai, India), Picker Art Gallery (Colgate University, NY), Tate (London, UK), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY).

    1. Marcella Sirhandi, “Part II: Styles and Techniques, Themes and Subjects,” in Mohan Samant: Paintings (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd.), 273.
    2. Ranjit Hoskote, “Mohan Samant: A One-Man Avant-Garde and History That Would Not Claim Him,” in Mohan Samant: Paintings (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd.), 16.