Aicon Gallery, London is pleased to present Figure/ Landscape Part Two, the second part of our successful New York show. The show features some of India's most prominent modernist painters, all well-known for their explorations of  both the figurative and the landscape. Landscape, the figurative and also the figure located in landscape occupy Indian modernist artists signficantly more so than in the European or the North American modernist tradition. In part this is down to a refusal on the part of most artists to commit totally to abstraction, unlike say, their European counterparts. And in part, the continued references to figure and the landscape seem to be a way of asserting a national identity to the modernist experiments Indian artists undertook at the time.

The figure of the common man or woman ensconced in a native landscape can be understood as an articulation of indigenous modernism. Typical is the artist Sudhir Patwardhan's aim which he described as "to make figures that can become self-images for the people who are the subject of my work." Or as Geeta Kapur wrote in "Contemporary Indian Artists": "The sense of community belongs as much to the past as to the future."
This two-part exhibition staged in New York and London aims to tease this points out through the presentation of works from across the twentieth-century (and some, indeed from the current century). Landscape and figure are the pivots for the project - a number of works show the figure dissolving into, or being almost a constituent part of the landscape. Other works veer towards being wholly landscape and some others, being almost wholly figurative.