Aditya Prakash (1924-2008) – polymath architect, artist, photographer, sculptor, writer, academic - belonged to the first generation of Indian modernists who sought to describe the entire cosmos of modern India, including art, architecture, design, planning and theatre. Painting was a lifelong practice for Prakash. He spent two to three hours every morning in his atelier, meditating on the expressions of a modern life not just for India, but more spiritually and sensually for the world.
Born in colonial India, Prakash studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and at the Glasgow School of Art before he returned to India in 1952 to join the Chandigarh team in response to the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s clarion call to build a new India. Early in his tenure Prakash painted a wall of his room in the Chandigarh Capital Project Architect’s Office in chalkboard black and started a painting practice that was to last a lifetime. His Indianization of Le Corbusier’s proportional system, the Modulor, was to inform his art and architecture for the rest of his life. Similar to Le Corbusier, Prakash’s artistic practice consisted of painting, drawing, and yoga in the morning, followed by architecture in the afternoon. Evenings were devoted to theatre and academic conversation.
Tapping into Indic forms, Prakash used boldly simplified imagery and overlapping formal orders, seeking correspondences between the life-worlds of humans, birds, animals, cities and villages, cosmic geometries, calligraphy and the female form - transforming them into a contemporary aesthetic. Ecological thinking, the interests of the ‘common man,’ and the search for the hidden threads that connect human life with those of animals and the planet, underlie his entire oeuvre, issues that are more relevant today than ever.
Prakash’s papers and architectural materials held at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2022), the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2024), the Taj Art Gallery (1989 and 1991) and the Bajaj Art Gallery (1994) in Mumbai, and the Alliance Francaise (c.1995) in Chandigarh.
