Amitava Das's practice is defined by preoccupations in India during the insurgencies and uncertainties that a newly formed national context was faced with, with the Cold War looming in the backdrop. Part of a generation that was born in the moment of Independence from colonial rule in 1947, Amitava was already familiar with early anti-colonial and post-independent modernisms in India, as well as post-war art in Europe such as the work of Giacometti, and Surrealism from an early age. These early influences led him to explore his own interiority in the 1960s, when he was an art student. The works that will be featured at Frieze Masters are mostly from the 1970s, and capture a prominent period in his practice that marks a departure from early considerations maintained by his practice to look outwards at the complex interrelations between the human experience and the world around. In this endeavour of contemplating external realities, two strands of work emerge as significant propositions by the artist in the 1970s. On one hand he frequently returned to his childhood in the idyllic landscape of Shimla, with its mountainscapes, greenery and creaturely existences, situating human existences as enmeshed with, and even corporeally constituted of the natural and more than human, animate and inanimate, lifeforms around them, in concurrence with the global rise of ecological consciousness in the decade. Another simultaneous body of work poetically responds to the politics of the time in a Soviet leaning, Non-Aligned nation state, that did not know whether to turn right or left, caught between the allure of capitalist consumerism and the romantic ideals that fuel revolutions. These works unconsciously draw from his awareness of student movements, protest cultures, the revival of Che Guera in the public imagination, and the poetry of Jibananda Das and Shakti Chattopadhyay.
 

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