F N Souza : Sacred & Profane showcases the remarkable range and inventiveness of India’s most iconic modernist across numerous artworks spanning from the kaleidoscopic crisscross gouaches of 1950 to his commanding canvases of 1960s. In these works, we find traces of the profane in his sacred imagery — an impasto void that shadows a red-hooded cardinal and his sins alike; spray-painted figures mutating divine Byzantine icons into apparitions of atomic-age anxiety; frenetic altars of vessels and flesh that confound the sanctity of ritual. And we find traces of the sacred in the profane, where uninhibited and sensual forms — as in the striptease of Henrietta Moraes — are so starkly human that they radiate pre-nativity nakedness and celebrate unapologetic human freedom.

Souza's genius resists easy partition. What compels is not only the opposition between sacred and profane, but their constant interpenetration—the way innocence and knowingness, violence and tenderness, fertility and stagnation coexist within a single painting. Small oil-on-paper works, like that of a grasshopper, reveal the textures of childlike curiosity. The portrait of his mother condenses decades of memory in chromatic intensity. The business tycoon stands encased in sartorial armor, a veneer of respectability that satirizes the legitimacy of the rich and powerful. Elsewhere, an embryonic head hovers at the threshold of becoming; recalling the decorative biology of Klimt to dissolve the boundary between human and post-human.
Together these works reveal a liminal zone of potentiality beyond any single dialectic: the sacred, the profane, and something that precedes and exceeds both. Across his oeuvre, Souza reconstitutes inherited artistic histories through his own symbolic vocabulary. With an attitude of open discovery, viewers will find that each work reveals its own questions, its own unwinding, and a fresh and intimate viewing experience.