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Born in 1928 in Shimla, Swaminathan was passionately fond of drawing and painting from his childhood. Multi-faceted Swaminathan was an artist, writer, ideologue, institution maker and activist.

He founded ‘Group 1980’, the manifesto of the group written by Swaminathan declared, “art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition, we do not sing of man nor are we his messiahs. Art is neither conformity of reality nor a flight for it, it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom”.

Through the mid 1970’s Swaminathan painted his best known series of works referred to as his ‘Bird –Mountain’ series. These landscapes executed in flat fields of colour possess a luminous quality. They are characterized by the semi abstract shapes and a rendering of shapes that is not naturalistic. They evoke the best in Indian pictorial tradition in a completely new language.