The Private Collection

Prying Into The Archives Such cognizant art practices are never easy when challenged by materiality. For Amar Nath Sehgal, the challenges of media mirrored his grappling with his inner turmoil and tensions. He explains his creative conceptual convictions: “The problem concerning the sculptor is chiefly to construct in material the form that conveys a mood, a feeling or an attitude. But when the feelings are not clear and well defined, when they lie dormant in the conscious mind, it is through hard and concentrated efforts that they are diagnosed and their meaning properly understood.”

He treated the material and the resulting form as means of reconciliation with his past: a spiraling journey cutting inwards and onwards; exhuming and horizontal, where memories were revisited and renegotiated everyday to break open the existing layer of creative expression, to delve deeper and grab onto the next layer to allow a purer and cleaner understanding of the past to take form. The resulting artwork had a strong rhythm and fluidity; as if Time flowed through the medium, eroding the jagged and hard edges of memories only to leave behind glistening forms with smooth lines retelling the story of mankind. This was the artistic parcours of the rtist-sculptor-poet, Amar Nath Sehgal.

The Amar Nath Sehgal Archives is an on-going project to document the life and art of the modern master. The Amar Nath Sehgal-Delhi Chapter initiative is perhaps the first of its kind in the country. The museum in its initial efforts to document the artworks of the artist under its website initiative, Collector’s Space came across a sizable number of artworks in public spaces in the Delhi-NCR region.

What seemed like a trivial act of reaching out to public and private institution resulted in months of communications, dialogues and navigating through unchartered territories. The lengthy yet fruitful process of reaching out to the public institutions required an in-depth study of the archival material pertaining to the artworks, the artist’s relationship with the concerned institutions and the politics of that era. The team also delved into artist’s copyright laws, governing laws of Indian public institutions and a subsequent documentation of the complete process that has led to the conception of this catalogue.

A result of months of labour not only with the archives but also restoration of the artworks and continuous dialogues with the institutions, the catalogue hopes to shed light on the extensive work that goes behind restoring and bringing into light any historical treasure. This is the first step towards creating a raisonné on public installations of the Indian modern master. We continue to work towards locating and documenting sculptures of the artist in Indian and international collections.