Jagdish Swaminathan (1928 – 1994) was born in Shimla, India, and educated at Delhi Polytechnic, and later in Warsaw, Poland. In the late 1950s, Swaminathan decided to become a full-time artist, and with his contemporaries he founded Group 1890. In the 1990s, he broke away from his earlier geometric brush paintings to explore the use of symbols in tribal art. Swaminathan received numerous awards during his career including the Nehru Fellowship to work on ‘The Significance of the Traditional Numen in Contemporary Art’. He was also a member of the International Jury of São Paulo, he served on the board of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and was a trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. In 1981, the government of Madhya Pradesh invited Swaminathan to set up Roopanker, an art museum at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. Over his career, Swaminathan held over 30 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous national and international exhibitions.