Pavilion at Gorka

Gorkha, in central Nepal, is the historic seat of the Shah dynasty and home to the hilltop Gorkha Durbar, a palace-temple complex of stepped courtyards and tiered pavilions. Summers' subject is most likely one of the wooden pavilions of this complex, framed against the surrounding hillsides. The composition would isolate the pavilion's silhouette — overhanging eaves, carved timber struts, a tiered roofline — against broad fields of colour standing for sky and slope, with internal detail kept to a minimum. Summers worked from cut plywood blocks inked and laid face-up, the paper pressed by hand and finished by spraying solvent through the sheet so that pigment migrated outward in a soft halation around each shape. The effect renders architecture less as object than as silhouette held in atmospheric light. Pavilion at Gorka sits within the Nepalese cycle of the 1980s alongside Kali Gandaki and Tilicho Lake, the architectural counterpart to those landscape sheets, and demonstrates the way Summers used Himalayan travel as continuous subject matter for the latter half of his career rather than as a single concentrated body of work.