AKBAR PADAMSEE (B. 1928)

"The concept of mirror images started when I began doing prints, I had done my print etching plate and when I took the print I didn't feel that was my print [...] It was then that I realized that the image was reversed [...] a mirror image." (Artist quote, V. Das, 'on the play of mirrors', Work in Language, Mumbai, 2010 p. 256)
Mirror Image epitomizes Padamsee's life-long obsession with using color and reflection, and experimentation with notions of duality and iteration across the picture plane. The very nature of the diptych format inherently relies on two halves to form a complete image. In each half, forms are not mirrored but echoed in the other, as if dual representations of similar realities. In Mirror Image for every individual focus, every path that leads the eye, there is its counterpoint. "Expression must contain its dialectical opposite, the conscious and the unconscious on the same physical plane. I have two eyes, two retinas, but the mind compounds the two images into one [...]." (Artist quote, Mirror Images, exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 1994, unpaginated)