Barbed Floss, Everyday Idols, Pop-art on pots and more..

NEWS

The Barbed Floss Show

The Guild art gallery, Mumbai, presents a group show by artists’ works from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The show titled ‘Barbed Floss’ is curated by eminent curator Veeranganakumari Solanki. 

The participating artists Tayeba Begum Lipi, Mahbubur Rahman, Promotesh Das Pulak,  Molla Sagar and Anisuzzaman Sohel present their new works and explorations in the show. 

The show concentrates on the personal and political narratives and urges the viewer to engage with issues like borders, exchange, displacement and relationships with reference to geo-politics concerning neighbouring countries.

The show previews on the 31st of July 2013 and will be on view till the 24th of August 2013.

Step Up show

(A work by Akbar Padamsee)

Jamaart Art Gallery, Mumbai presents a group show of art works by eminent contemporary artists of the country today and from yesteryears. The show impresses with an array works by artists who have received critical acclaim in the country and abroad for their exquisite works.

The participating artists are Akbar Padamesee, Jehangir Sabvala, Bal Chabda, GR Santosh, KG Subramaniam, Prabhakar Kolte, Rini Dhumal, Samir Mondal, AV Ilango, Sachin Jaltare, Bharti Prajapati, Fawad Tamkant, Ramesh Gorjala, Shankar Kendal, Krishna Pulkundwar, Pandurang Tathe, Sunil Padwal and others. 

The art works are rendered in different mediums and styles and are a reflection of beauty and imagination.

The show is on view till the 30th of August 2013.

Everyday Idols

(A work on display at the show)

Country Collection Gallery, New Delhi, presents a show titled, ‘ Everyday Idols’. The show is a solo of the artist, Sanjay Thapar.

The exhibition is about celebrating every day people, strangers one would come across.
It is all about people who have met the artist and he interacted and spoke to them during his trips and travels to various parts of the country. He tends to bring all this back to his canvas.

These are the people who have made a difference in his life one way or the other or have left an impression on him in his every day thinking. Faces, expressions and facial characters tend to fascinate and intrigue the artist, and he tries to tell a story through it all.

The works are rendered in oils and acrylic on canvas. The show is on view till the 11th of August 2013.

Impressionistic expressions

La Galerie D’Expression, Chennai presents a solo show of art works by artist, E Rabindranath. 

The show displays an array of very intricately and exquisitely rendered impressionistic style art works. The artist has taken inspiration from the style and created paintings with topics more akin more to the Indian scenario.The strokes are short and thick, and dabs of paint, vibrant and colourful dominate the heavy relief work and textures created. The paintings depict movements, compositions, hard emotions, shadow and light work and freshness in their unique and distinctive style. 

The show is on view till the 31st of July 2013.

(News reports by Sushma Sabnis)

FEATURE

Pop-art on pots

Jimmy Johns is a self-taught artist. At his studio, he turns humble pots into colourful works of art.

Jimmy Johns wore a pair of orange pants seven years ago, which upset the fashion sensibilities of quite a few people in downtown Kochi, especially his parents. “Today you see guys wearing crazy coloured pants and suddenly, it is cool,” he says. Dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and black jeans, gelled hair combed down, thick moustache in place, style, for Jimmy, is the most important thing — the kind of thing that defines a personality. In fact, his engagement with style has a lot to do with his line of work.

Jimmy is a self-made pop-artist, who began painting on a series of pots a year-and-a-half ago. In the porch of his house at Edappally, which doubles as his studio, ‘Creative Fingers’, occupying pride of place is a huge Will Smith pot. The Hollywood star’s face lies spread out on a fat white pot. Caricaturing is Jimmy’s forte, one finds out, as American President Barack Obama emerges on another pot. There is a Rajnikant lookalike and Sylvester Stallone, too. Celebrity faces find an interesting representation in Jimmy’s works. He picks his personalities after regarding them carefully. “I have to feel the depth of their eyes, you know.” When he does pick a subject, his or her eyes, ears and cheeks are the defining factors. “The overall expressiveness of the face, too,” Jimmy explains. Jim Carrey is the next face he has chosen. “His face makes me think of a triangle. The pot will be triangular.”

Jimmy draws his inspiration from a mix of pop-culture influences. He is an ad filmmaker, who runs a company called Ad Minister, and a graphic artist, who briefly considered becoming a fashion designer. He is currently pursuing a course in interior designing and visual merchandising. He is an amateur photographer, too. “I would like to believe that I picked up a bit from everything,” he says. The pots on display at the studio showcase a variety of random images ranging from a light bulb to penguins, motifs inspired by playing-cards, scenery and models showing off designer clothes and make-up. “Fashion is such an intriguing subject; you can keep on drawing from it.” He simulates the proportions of the pots and the images on the computer before he begins work on them.

“Pots are not just for sticking flowers into. They can contribute to the interiors a great deal,” he says. His pots cost between Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 8,000.

He gets his pots custom-made in Nilambur, Malappuram district. They come in unique sizes; the tallest one being about 3-ft.

Pot-making is a long procedure. They are left out to dry for about 20 days and then for another 10 days, they are left inside the kiln.

The pots are then treated intensively before being painted upon. The paintings, Jimmy stresses, done in acrylic, do not fade and are not affected by vagaries of the weather. During the initial stages, he even left some out in the sun and the rain to test their durability.

While most of his works are on clay pots, Jimmy has been working on wood too. His current preoccupation is with clocks. He has designed a few of them on printed synthetic sheets, in different themes.

(Report by Anasuya Menon, Photos by K K Mustafa, for The Hindu)