Overview

“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes…Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”

Arshile Gorky

Pandit Khairnar was born in 1968 in Nashik, Maharashtra, now known as wine country, situated on the banks of the Godavari river. The rugged yet verdant terrain had a lasting impact on Khairnar’s sensibilities and he found himself drawn towards abstract painting, even as a young man. Khairnar studied for a Diploma in Art Teaching from Y. K. M., Aurangabad in 1989. He further completed a Diploma in Fine Art from L. S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai in 1992. After which he was based in Mumbai for the last 25 years. He returned to his hometown, Nashik, in 2013. Working from Nashik provided comfort to his artistic senses, not just because it was his hometown, but because the city has art in its air, with its temple complexes and ancient caves. Its serene beauty and peaceful environment inspires him to paint. He uses layer upon layer of oil paint to create evocations of fascinating shades of light, like silent music. Through his paintings, he describes his memories spent in idyllic fields and attempts to recapture that point between twilight and dusk when the light changes in a few seconds and the open sky is a hue of myriad colours, intangible and mystic.

For Pandit Khairnar, the ‘anxious object’, is the earth and sky. In his hands, the abstract painting becomes an object of gestalt recognition. According to German psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim, visual perception precedes thinking and steps into a form of cognition that is beyond the visual. The physicality of Khairnar’s work is different, since he is known to destabilize one hue with the existence of the other. Eschewing figuration or decorativeness, his colour-field painting strives to capture essence or the ‘isness’. Khairnar attempts to represent the intangible, sifting the infinite from the finite moving beyond the pigmented interplays of conventional abstract expressionism and delves into the world of atmospheric depth. He describes his memories spent in idyllic fields and attempts to recapture that point between twilight and dusk when the light changes in a few seconds and the open sky is a hue of myriad colours, intangible and mystic.