Ambadas Khobragade

Born in Akola, Maharashtra, in 1922, Ambadas received training at a private art school in Ahmedabad, run by the artist Ravi Shankar Raval.

Unfortunately, after three years of landscape and figurative art, Ambadas felt he was a misfit and left Ahmedabad for Bombay. He enrolled at Sir J. J. School of Art in 1947 where, along with classmates Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, and Mohan Samant, he completed his diploma in 1952.

His subaltern origins and frugal living, Gandhian values and high ideals, all shaped his personality into a complex one, with the clash of material and spiritual needs making him strive for a higher purpose in life.

Employment as a handloom textile designer at the government-run Weavers’ Service Centre made him shift from Bombay to Madras, and then to New Delhi. Here, he met like-minded artists J. Swaminathan, Rajesh Mehra and Himmat Shah, with whom, in 1962, he became one of the twelve founder members of Group 1890. These artists questioned the existing art scenarios and contemplated the ideological shifts necessary for modern Indian art, both through criticism and novel creation. However, the association did not last long, disintegrating soon after the group’s first and only exhibition.

An abstract artist, Ambadas won the Lalit Kala Akademi’s national award in 1963 for his work, Hot Wind Blows Inside Me. He soon travelled to the U.S.A. and Germany on a scholarship and, in 1972, settled in Norway. He passed away in Oslo in May 2012.