In Mumbai, centenary exhibition returns to the making of Laxman Pai and the porous beginnings of Indian modernism

A hundred years after his birth, Laxman Pai is being approached from an unexpected angle. At Akara Modern, the centenary exhibition Early Lines, Lasting Forms resists the sweep of a full retrospective. Instead, it turns its gaze to the decades between the 1950s and the 1970s, a period when Mr Pai’s artistic language was still being assembled, questioned, and refined. The result is an exhibition that privileges process over monument, and formation over legacy.

All you need to know about Laxman Pai’s centenary exhibition in Akara Modern

For Puneet Shah, this was a deliberate refusal of the commemorative. “In marking the centenary of Laxman Pai, we were less interested in a commemorative survey and more invested in returning to the moment of becoming,” he explains. “Rather than presenting a comprehensive retrospective, we chose to foreground his formative decades, those years of experimentation, exposure, and internal negotiation that shaped his visual language.”

This curatorial narrowing sharpens rather than limits the view. Mr Pai emerges as an artist in motion, absorbing and testing, often holding multiple worlds in tension. Born in Madgaon in 1926, his early life unfolded under Portuguese rule in Goa, with its Catholic iconography and coastal rhythms. By the early 1950s, he was in Paris, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, encountering post-war European modernism at close range. Later, he would work between Goa and Bombay, navigating an Indian art world in the midst of self-definition.

What becomes clear in this exhibition is that Mr Pai’s modernism was never a matter of stylistic adoption. Shah notes, “This focused lens allows audiences to witness Mr Pai in motion: absorbing influences, testing material boundaries, and articulating a distinctly personal response to modernism. It reveals the vulnerability and ambition of a young artist navigating multiple worlds—Goa, Bombay, Paris—and shows how his grammar of line, colour, and texture was constructed over time.”

Works from the early 1950s reveal a taut engagement with the figure. Angular profiles, flattened planes, and emphatic eyes suggest dialogues with Egyptian reliefs and European figuration, filtered through memory rather than direct quotation. Paintings such as Nayikaa and Marriage show Mr Pai experimenting with geometry and composition while remaining anchored to Indian subjects. Watercolours from the same period offer a different register, more fluid, yet equally attentive to structure.

Mr Pai’s years in Paris sit at the centre of this story, and the exhibition is careful to avoid the tired language of influence as dominance. “Conventional readings of Indian modernism often frame it as a negotiation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ or between nationalist idioms and Western influence,” Shah says. “Pai complicates that binary.” His exposure to European modernism, and to other non-Indian visual traditions circulating in Paris at the time, expanded his technical and conceptual range. What it did not do was displace Goa from his imagination. “What is striking is how firmly he remained rooted in the memory of Goa—its landscape, its Catholic iconography, its lyricism.”

By the 1960s, Mr Pai’s surfaces thicken. Knife work becomes more pronounced, palettes deepen, and brushstrokes lengthen. Landscapes from Kashmir sit alongside Goan scenes, suggesting travel as an extension of inquiry rather than escape. The land is approached less as topography and more as an emotional register, shaped by recollection and distance. The 1970s introduce further shifts in tonality and symbolism, yet the subjects endure.

Holding change and continuity in the same frame is one of the exhibition’s quieter achievements. Shah resists the idea of artistic development as a ladder. “The key lies in resisting a linear narrative of ‘progress’,” he reflects. “Evolution in an artist’s practice does not necessarily mean rupture.” Instead, the gallery stages conversations across decades, allowing motifs to recur and transform. “This approach encourages viewers to see continuity not as repetition, but as deepening. The Goa of his later works is not the same as the Goa of his youth—it is layered with distance, nostalgia and lived experience.”

The exhibition also speaks to Akara Modern’s broader positioning within the art ecosystem. Since its expansion into distinct Modern and Contemporary spaces, the gallery has argued for an active dialogue between periods that are too often siloed. Revisiting Mr Pai’s formative years makes that argument tangible. “An exhibition centred on a modern master like Mr Pai underscores how many of the questions we consider ‘contemporary’—identity, place, hybridity, global circulation—were already being negotiated in the mid-twentieth century,” Shah observes.

Seen from this perspective, Early Lines, Lasting Forms feels less like a centenary look backwards and more like a recalibration of the present. Mr Pai’s work resists tidy categorisation. It refuses to sit comfortably within nationalist narratives or Eurocentric art histories. Instead, it proposes modernism as something dialogic, shaped by exchange, translation, and personal memory.

At a moment when global art discourse is increasingly attentive to plural modernities, returning to Mr Pai’s beginnings carries a particular charge. The exhibition suggests that what feels urgent today has long been present, embedded in practices that moved across borders without surrendering specificity. In focusing on Mr Pai before he became canonical, Akara Modern invites viewers to reconsider how artistic languages are formed, and how histories might be written from moments of uncertainty rather than resolution.

Early Lines, Lasting Forms: Laxman Pai at 100. February 19 – March 28, 11 am - 6.30 pm. At Akara Modern, Mereweather Road, Mumbai.

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