JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
Jehangir Sabavala (1922-2011) was born to an affluent Parsi family in Bombay. He attended the Cathedral and John Connon School, and later Elphinstone College in Bombay. Subsequently, he earned a diploma from the J.J. School of Art in 1944, and then went to London where he studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art from 1945 to 1947. He dedicated himself to synthesising European training with a dynamic postcolonial environment, and so continued his education at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, in 1957.
Sabavala mostly worked in oils and was known for his land and seascapes. He practised the modernist style, creating wedges of paint to form vast, still landscapes. The human figure which began to appear in a diminutive form, enveloped in solitude, began to emerge in close ups whilst retaining the distance of a nostalgic past. These ‘receding planes’ gives each canvas an illusory sense of depth, illustrating Sabavala’s mastery over light, colour, and texture. He was greatly inspired by Japanese and Himalayan Art.
Sabavala’s career spanned more than sixty years, and he held more than thirty solo exhibitions in India and Europe, as well as more than 150 group shows internationally. His work is also a part of numerous private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in Bombay. Three monographs have been published on Sabavala. Arun Khopkar’s film on Sabavala’s life and art, ‘Colours of Absence,’ won the National Award in 1994. In 2010, another film about his life was made called ‘The Inheritance of Light: Jehangir Sabavala’.
He received the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1977 and the Lalit Kala Ratna by the President of India in 2007. Sabavala passed away in Bombay in 2011.
