The Amar Nath Sehgal Private Collection, the first single artist museum of the country is an ode to the sixty years long story of reconciliation of the life and art of the Indian modern artist, Amar Nath Sehgal, a man in constant struggle for nearly six decades with the memories of Partition. For Amar Nath Sehgal, the challenges of media mirrored his grappling with his inner turmoil and tensions. He explains his creative conceptual convictions: “The problem concerning the sculptor is chiefly to construct in material the form that conveys a mood, a feeling or an attitude. But when the feelings are not clear and well defined, when they lie dormant in the conscious mind, it is through hard and concentrated efforts that they are diagnosed and their meaning properly understood.”1

He treated the material and the resulting form as a means of reconciliation with his past: a spiraling journey cutting inwards and onwards: exhuming and horizontal, where memories were revisited and renegotiated everyday to break open the existing layer of creative expression, to delve deeper and grab onto the next layer to allow a purer and cleaner understanding of the past to take form. The resulting artwork had a strong rhythm and fluidity; as if Time flowed through the medium, eroding the jagged and hard edges of memories only to leave behind glistening forms with smooth lines retelling the story of mankind. This was the artistic parcours of the artist-sculptor-poet, Amar Nath Sehgal.

The artist had a 24 year long romance with Luxembourg which began in 1979 and went on even after his departure from Luxembourg in 2004. He was invited by Luxembourg to set up his studio and live in the country by Prime Minister Pierre Werner. Luxembourg slowly seeped in amber, copper and gold hues into his grey watercolour works. These exquisite and vibrant watercolours would often find themselves on the cover of the cultural section of the daily, Luxemburger Wort.