Winning Bid
Illustrated are two views of the sculpture
Published : ‘Painted Encounters : Parsi Traders and the Community & No Parsi is an Island’ by National Gallery of Modern Art, 2016, pg 303.
Exhibited : ‘Painted Encounters : Parsi Traders and the Community & No Parsi is an Island’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art. 26th December 2013 - 28th January 2014, Mumbai. 20th March – 29th May 2016, Delhi.
Provenance : Property from the collection of a Parsi lady based in Mumbai.
Height of the figure - 6ft
Adi (Ardeshir) Davierwalla was born in Sanjan, a village in Gujarat in the year 1922. He studied at St
Joseph's Boys School in Coonoor, till he was 18 years old. Although he displayed interest in art at an
early age, his parents wanted him to pursue a mainstream profession and therefore he trained to
become a pharmaceutical chemist.
A self-trained sculptor, he refrained from following the traditional methodology of preparing a plaster
cast but rather attacked the medium directly, he dabbled with multiple textures such as wood, steel,
marble and stone.
The artist fused various inspirations in his work such as, his scientific background and his many
interactions with Dr. Homi Bhabha. Therefore his works display a sense of the primordial cosmos
conscience.
Ebrahim Alkazi hosted a retrospective of Adi Davierwalla’s works at Jehangir Art Gallery in 1979. Fondly
referred to as Adi, he was one of India's pioneering Modernist sculptors and passed away in 1975 at the
age of 53.
