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Biography and Contextualization of the Work

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Biography and Contextualization of the Work

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Pilloo Pochkhanawala was born in 1923 in Bombay, India (presently Mumbai) (Sotheby’s) where she lived in a “mansion…in a traditional joint family system” with her grandparents, their three children, her siblings, and her cousins (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). Pochkhanawala describes her childhood and youth as shaped by her Parsi family who followed Zoastrian religion, and by her grandparents who wanted her to conform to specific rules of art making permitted by Parsi art practises (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192) [Parsi people descended from Parsi Zoastrians who historically immigrated to India to escape religious persecution] (Britannica).

Pochkhanawala describes her peer groups as opening up her experiences to, and participation in the art world, in an India experiencing the upheaval of the “Quit India Movement” in 1940-44 (in parallel with the second World War), which Pochkhanawala has described as being at the centre of (192). Pochkhanawala was 22 when she received her degree in commerce in 1945 (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192).  From there she worked at an advertising firm, which in 1951 took her on a project to Europe where she witnessed “original works by Brancusi, Germane Richter, Henry Moore, Hepworth, Chadwick, Calder and many other contemporary sculptors” that sparked an emotional reaction in her which drove her to pursue sculpture (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192): “every time I looked at the major works of modern sculptors I felt struck by a visual bolt… The paintings did not ruffle my inner composure… [whereas with the sculpture] I was seized by the fear of the challenge of tackling something so difficult.” (Sotheby’s).

When Pochkhanawala returned to Bombay to pursue a career in sculpture she was presented with the problem of how to honour, and weave the history of Indian sculpture’s legacy and techniques into her work (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192): “the first generation of post-Independence sculptors had the task of reconciling with the country’s past, while having to look forward, as it were, to the future” (Das Gupta 13). This posed a challenge for sculptors with few recently created references to go off given India’s colonization by the British impacted the kinds of sculpture allowed within the colony (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192).

Pochkhanawala has said that prior to British rule the Mogul empire (ruling from 711-1764) did not influence sculpture since Islam forbid figurative sculpture, in contrast to “The British [who] brought art schools to India to impose Western representational art…[where] Victorian prudery caused them to regard India's sculptural heritage as crude and obscene” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). Because of this, Indian sculptors were expected to replicate traditional British sculpture including “commemorative statues,” and to incorporate influences like Greek and Roman classical sculpture ” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). From the 1900s-1940s Bombay was a central hub for colonial sculpture which was adopted into universities, art societies, and into local competitions held (Art Deco Mumbai). The market for this work expanded given that Bombay was a port city which opened up wealthy patrons interested in sculpture to access it (Art Deco Mumbai).

Pochkhanawala wanted to create a style of sculpture that was informed by the “vitality, and fluidity” of India’s sculptural past, before British colonization, while simultaneously incorporating the Western influences she gathered on her travels, which had a universal quality in their work (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192-193). Pochkhanawala shared the views of Rabindranath Tagore, who was against nationalist art for his belief in its divisiveness: Tagore believed in the importance of Universal art for Indian artists’ freedom as based in art making that could extend beyond themes of cultural identity (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192-193).

India gained Independence with the 1947 partition, and with that a new style of sculpture was forged that separated itself from the traditional figurative and commemorative statues of the British (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 193). Pochkhanawala struggled with creating sculpture that was separate from her cultural identity and came to realize that sculptors were inseparable from their backgrounds after travelling to Greece where she visited the sculptor Aperghis’ studio (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 193).

During her visit she recalled, “ [I was] struck by the fact that Aperghis' earlier works and my sculptures…were influenced by our different traditions of sculpture of the past. Mine were more slab-like in form, like bas-reliefs of India, while his were related to the free-standing figures of Ancient Greece” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 193). This aligned with Tagore’s stance on modernist art where he reassured Indian artists concerned with their cultural identity’s loss in their work that it would shine through in formal and conceptual approach (Jamal 157). Pochkhanawala asserted that Indian artists have an implicit awareness and sensibility for a range of “religious philosophies, concepts, and customs” and their symbolic manifestations, compared to Western artists, which surfaced through in creation regardless of Indian artists’ intent to create works autonomous from cultural identity or not (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192).

Throughout her career as a sculptor, Pochkhanawala experimented with a range of materials and techniques, beginning with wood carving to create her seated female figures in the 1950’s, then welding with “scrap iron and steel,” to cement and metal casting (often using aluminum alloy) in the 1960’s-1970’s (Pochkhanawala  & Clerk 193; Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation). Pochkhanawala found a sculpting mentor in Narayan Ganesh Pansare, who taught her how to work with a range of different materials (Sotheby’s).

Pochkhanawala was also the organizer of the Bombay Arts Festival for many years in the 1960’s and onwards. Pochkhanawala was passionate about introducing the public to contemporary Indian art, so she organized an “Open-Air exhibition in 1978,” where artists and musicians working in a range of mediums could present their work on topics related to the theme “Time Cycle” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She passed away in 1986 (Christie’s).

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Meaning of the Work: Material Exploration, Artist Inspirations, Content, and Political Influences

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Meaning of the Work: Material Exploration, Artist Inspirations, Content, and Political Influences

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Modernity took shape in India in different ways than the West’s notion of abstraction, as did efforts to apply its principles to the analysis of Indian modernist sculpture (Progressive Painters' Association 51). A distinct tool of Indian modernist sculpture was referencing the figure, and its abstraction as a way to communicate “rarer categories [(or ambiguous concepts)] like sensibility, feeling, emotion, intelligence and passion” (Progressive Painters' Association 51). In her early career this tool is evident in Pochkhanawala’s rendering of seated figures out of beaten led, wood, and cement to represent the fatalism she described as seeing in the “serene immobility… of the sitting posture of Indian women” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). It was through her material research and animation that Pochkhanawala was able to capture this nuanced and intangible fatalism that she saw in women from her culture.

Following the production of these works, Pochkhanawala learned how to weld in her friend’s factory, and became interested in welding scraps of iron and steel and selecting scraps from metal yards that “met [her] changing moods” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She was interested in new and evolving materials that were introduced by industry (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 193).Pochkhanawala’s material exploration allowed her to capture the essence of intangible concepts like joy, death, decay, and hope (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She often explored the concept of time in her works, including in a 1977 series that centred “preservation, destruction, and re-creation [as] repeated perpetually” (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194).

After creating stage pieces for a play called ‘The Splendoured One’ out of Thermocole (Styrofoam) Pochkhanawala realized the potential of using Thermocole patterns for cast sculpture (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She created specific blends of  aluminum, nickel, and silica plus copper bronze because she felt pure aluminum appeared too cold (this coldness clashed with her interest in emulating active life forces in her works) (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194).

Pochkhanawala created works with autonomous energies experienced in their presence through her range of material use and scale. Some of her works employed figurative references and others like ‘Erosion’ and ‘Time Destroys” were nonfigurative and biological in nature but again sought to materialize the intangible (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). Pochkhanawala described the scars, scratches, and corrosion that that her sculptures held as “her signature,” in her recount of her Metal-Scape sculptures exhibited in 1974 (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She described these sculptures as holding great growth-potential, despite being small in scale, and as meaningful and dramatic in the marks they bared be it through the implication of either erosion over time, or instantaneous explosion (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194).

She took inspiration from artists, like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who shared an interest in materializing the intangible, including the spiritual (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). Critics have likened Pochkhanawala’s interest in creating works with a vitality of their own” to Moore’s (Sotheby’s).

She was “dissatisfied” with works she perceived as striving for “sensationalism” through sculptural shortcuts that read as stagnant and unimpressive to her compared to the “restlessness and gnawing convictions” that stirred in her in the presence of Moore and Hepworth’s works (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192), and the admiration she felt in reflecting on the “vitality and fluidity” of India’s sculptural past (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). In 1983 (three years before her death), Pochkhanawala wrote about the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s exhibition in New Delhi, and at the Tata Theatre in Bombay (18).

She wrote in awe of Rodin’s understanding of human anatomy and ability to animate stone to capture specific human emotions (Pochkhanawala 18). Pochkhanawala was equally critical of Rodin’s emphasis on mastering anatomy over cultivating spiritual experiences in his work (Pochkhanawala 18). She was drawn to his revival of European eroticism in sculpture, which she described as having been replaced by many of his peers with the sculpted “posture of love without its passion” (Pochkhanawala 19). Pochkhanawala was captivated by how Rodin captured a “total surrender” of his figures’ in passion (Pochkhanawala 19). This captivation makes sense give Pochkhanawala's interest in communicating nuanced concepts and spiritual experiences (Pochkhanawala 19).

Politically, Pochkhanawala was shaped by India’s decolonization (she was ages 17-21 during India’s 1940-1944 “Quit India Movement”) (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). At the start of her career as a sculptor, in her late twenties, Pochkhanawala struggled to create decolonial art that referenced India’s sculptural past, before British colonization, while adopting techniques from contemporary European artists that she saw value in (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 192). Her career as a female sculptor using a male dominated medium in tandem with her large scale material exploration has been described as “dauntless,” but reluctant in sharing “the radicalism of feminist discourse” (Mushtaq 3). I would argue Pochkhanawala's early wood sculptures that capture Indian women’s sense of fatalism, preferred medium of sculpture, and approach to experimentation and scale as evidenced in her public sculptures like “Stone Age to Space” and “Spark” (see figures 3 and 4) (Khambatta 16) all speak to feminist discourses given their content and their use of traditionally male approaches to creating.

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Pilloo Pochkhanawala’s Untitled (see figure 5) was created  out of teakwood, early on in her career in the 1950’s,  when she was experimenting largely with wood, lead, and cement (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). Metal-Scape II (see figure 6) is an aluminum alloy caste sculpture using Thermocole patterns that was likely created in the 1970’s for her Metal-Scapes exhibition in 1974 (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194).

Untitled is photographed as a sculptural object against a grey backdrop. The teakwood makes the object a warm light brown colour that varies in tone as the viewer’s eyes trace the two dominant vertical forms that are attached to a small teakwood box. The left vertical form is shorter than its right counterpart. It extends upwards and appears almost biological, or as though it references the figure in its organic form (a misshapen/long oval) that appears to have a long ovular asymmetrical hole that stretches inside of it. The right vertical form is similar but is about 1/3 taller than its left counterpart. It has two visible asymmetrical ovular holes that stretch inside it’s centre. The two forms visually touch in the optics of the photo documentation, but in real space I suspect do not and instead stand in near contact. The forms attach to the square box they rest on in a delicate and slightly elevated way, which coupled with their organic shape and near touch give a sense of referencing two bodies in intimacy. The two vertical forms appear to just barely touch the box as though they are levitating of it with energy. The teakwood box gives the forms some sense of grounding, and elevates their importance as objects by lifting them off the ground. The box acts as a step that moves the objects closer to the sky creating a sense of upward accession and spirituality. This aligns with Pochkhanawala’s priority to emulate both spirituality and autonomous energy in her works (Pochkhanawala 19). The sculpture shows her admiration for Henry Moore’s works in their shared interests in emulating spirituality, creating forms with autonomous energies, use of wood, and use of holes in sculpture (Sotheby’s).

Metal-Scape II is a public sculpture exhibited outside of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India. The work is a landscape created out of aluminum alloy that highlights Pochkhanawala’s interest in the new “materials of industry” of her time (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 193). Like Untitled, Metal-Scape II employs the use of a prism to lifts upward ascending elements off the ground. The separate elements in the work read as rock-like elements (that I will call stones) assembled together into a landscape, which is inferred based on their horizontal composition and the piece's titling. These rocks take the form of misshapen rectangular prisms. The stones’ scored surfaces imply erosion and time based wear. Four stones are positioned as verticals that extend upwards and do not touch (three located on the right side of the platform, and one located on the left), where one small horizontal stone is positioned on the back left surface of the platform. Four of the stones do not touch, where the three tallest vertical stones bear horizontally composed stones that are secured to them to create a ladder-like structure. Two of these horizontal stones have holes in their centre. The holes bear scratches round their perimeters that give a sense of naturally occurring time-based erosion. This again shows Pochkhanawala’s interest in Moore’s emulation of naturally occurring holes in sculpture. The gradual accession of the vertical metal prisms seem to reference buildings in a city scape and the rectangular negative spaces amongst the landscape echo the shapes of the windows and structure of the National Gallery of Modern Art building that it stands in front of. The work’s reference to a city scape could come from Pochkhanawala’s interest in connecting the natural world in content with the new industrial materials of her time as embodied through a modern city scape.

Pochkhanawala has also spoken about some of her Metal-Scapes as referencing the shore of the Indian Ocean on Bombay’s coast (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194). She has described envisioning her work Metal-Scape, MI (see figure 1) on the shore of the Indian Ocean with water crashing through it’s open spaces, and as providing stillness and reflection amongst the crashing waves and the open outdoor space (Pochkhanawala & Clerk 194).

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1. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Metal-Scape MI, sculpture, aluminum alloy, 1974.

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2.  Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Time Cycle, sculpture, cast aluminum alloy and stainless steel, 1977.

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3. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Stone Age to Space, sculpture, sandstone and cast aluminum. Outdoor sculpture at the Nehru Centre Lawn in Worli, Mumbai, India

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4. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Spark, sculpture. Outdoor sculpture in Haji Ali, Mumbai, India 

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5. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Untitled, teakwood sculpture, 1950s. Sotheby’s Auction House.

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6. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Metal scape II, sculpture, aluminum alloy. Exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India.

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7. Pilloo Pochkhanwala, Assassination, sculpture, cement metal and painted fibre glass, 1981

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8. Pilloo Pochkhanwala, Monsoon, sculpture, aluminum alloy, 1983. Exhibited at the Vir-Gal sculptures virtual exhibition, 2020.

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Figure 1. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Metal-Scape MI, sculpture, aluminum alloy, 1974. Image taken from Pilloo R. Pochkhanawala and S. I . Clerk, “On My Work as a Sculptor,” Leonardo, Summer Vol, 12, No. 3 (1979): 193.

Figure 2. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Time Cycle, sculpture, cast aluminum alloy and stainless steel, 1977. Image taken from Pilloo R. Pochkhanawala and S. I . Clerk, “On My Work as a Sculptor,” Leonardo, Summer Vol, 12, No. 3 (1979): 193.

Figure 3. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Stone Age to Space, sculpture, sandstone and cast aluminum. Nehru Centre Lawn, Mumbai, India. Image taken from Hindustan Times https://www.hindustantimes.com/Images/HTEditImages/Images/NOTVDAY/28_01_M_NTD_16.pdf. Accessed 20 November 2020.

Figure 4. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Spark, sculpture. Haji Ali, Mumbai, India. Image taken from Hindustan Times https://www.hindustantimes.com/Images/HTEditImages/Images/NOTVDAY/28_01_M_NTD_16.pdf. Accessed 20 November 2020.

Figure 5. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Untitled, teakwood sculpture, 1950s. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s Auction House https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/modern-contemporary-south-asian-art-2/pilloo-pochkhanawala-untitled. Accessed 10 November 2020.

Figure 6. Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Metal scape II, sculpture, aluminum alloy, 242 x 90 x 192 (h) cm, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi & Google Arts and Culture Project, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/metal-scape-ii-pilloo-pochkhanwala/bAEacBjciNq1yQ?hl=en. Accessed on November 24, 2020.

Figure 7. Pilloo Pochkhanwala, Assassination, sculpture, cement metal and painted fibre glass,  80 x 48.5 x 43 cm, 1981. Image taken from http://www.artnet.com/artists/pilloo-pochkhanawala/assassination-a1E9NUowiNedEa0McK5yug2. Accessed 14 November 2020.

Figure 8. Pilloo Pochkhanwala, Monsoon, sculpture, aluminum alloy, 1983. National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. Image taken from the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai http://ngmaindia.gov.in/ngma_mumbai_virtual-sculupture.asp. Accessed 5 November 2020.

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“PILLOO POCHKHANAWALA UNTITLED.” Sotheby’s. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/modern-contemporary-south-asian-art-2/pilloo-pochkhanawala-untitled . Accessed 10 November 2020.

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Pochkhanawala, Pilloo. "The Rodin Exhibition: Tata Theatre, March 19-April 21, 1983.” Review of The Rodin Exhibition, by Auguste Rodin.  1 January 1983, pp. 9-20. Retieved from https://www.sahapedia.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/The%20Rodin%20Exhibition.pdf. Accessed 22 November 2020.

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