The Baroda March 2014, A A Raiba Felicitated and more..

NEWS

AA Raiba honoured with State Award

(Artist Abdul Aziz Raiba)

The Fine Arts Department of the State of Maharashtra honoured the painter Abdul Aziz Raba with a Lifetime Achievement Award towards his immense contribution to the field of Art. The event was held at Jehangir Art Gallery, and the Chief Guest, Honorable Minister Rajesh Tope presented the award on behalf of the state to the senior artist.

Also accompanying the event was The Maharashtra State Art Exhibition 2013-14 which previewed on the 5th March and will be on view till 11th March 2014 at the AC-3 gallery.

The show is jointly curated by Prof. Shashikant Kakade and Prof Anant Nikam of JJ School of Art and Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma of Clark House Initiative.

Traces and Tears

( Work on display)

Project 88, Mumbai presents a solo show of artist Sandeep Mukherjee, titled, ‘Traces and Tears’. Working in painting, drawing and installation, Mukherjee positions his work in abstraction that is both phenomenological and ontological - where aesthetics informs experience and art researches its own specific conditions. Improvisational and process based, Mukherjee's work investigates materiality and the body as a means to resist identity and conceptual determination. The work asserts pleasure and embodied criticality in order to inhabit an expanded field of structural logic and subjectivity. Following multiple paths through figuration, the performing body, architecture as site and abstraction, the work continues to explore the tension between process, image, affect and meaning. 

Mukherjee received an MFA from UCLA, and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Born in Pune, India, he lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Art at Pomona College. 

The show commences on 13th March and will be on view till 19th April 2014.

The Baroda March 2014

(Work on display)

Rukshaan Art presents a show at the Coomaraswamy Hall of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, titled, ‘The Baroda March 2014’. The show will display paintings and sculptures made by upcoming as well as established artists.

This is an annual event, a brain child of gallerist and curator Rukshaan Krishna, where she involves and displays the works of the newer and the older generation of Baroda based or Baroda educated artists. The show aims to bring out the freshness and novelty of thoughts and skill of the artists.

The show previews on 8th March at 5:30pm and will be on view till 16th March 2014.

Fragment Nature

( Work by Maruthi Paila)

Icon Art Gallery, Hyderabad presents a solo show of art work by artist Maruthi Paila. The show titled, ‘Fragment Nature’ features abstract art works by the artist.

Abstract art is personal and subjective and Maruthi Paila explores those possibilities of expression in myriad ways. Moving away from figurative imagery, Maruthi dwells in the non-representational world. The acrylics and small format works are geometric, with criss-cross lines forming haphazard, asymmetrical patterns perhaps resulting from an outpour of the artist’s emotions. It’s like a mosaic of lines and colours. Yet, there is a sense of harmony in the composition. Maruthi has been seeking to find a language of his own working and exploring different types of imagery, figurative and non-figurative - a continuous exercise to develop his visual vocabulary for growth and perfection. 

The show previews on 7th March at 6:30pm and will be on view till 20th March 2014.

(News reports by Sushma Sabnis)


FEATURE

Bridging the distance

As an exhibition of astrophotography goes on in the city, Ajay Talwar, a participant and one of the few belonging to the tribe, explains why he loves to demystify the celestial world.

(SKY IS THE LIMIT: Dolly and Pankaj)

Demystifying the skies and bringing the celestial bodies closer to people are three photographers — Laurent Laveder, Thierry Legault from France and Ajay Talwar — at Jantar Mantar. The site, an 18th century astronomical observatory, couldn’t have been more appropriate, even though in recent years it has come to be first registered as a site of protest in our minds. But the exhibition “Astrophotography” — organised by Institut Francais en Inde, the French Embassy in India and the Alliance Francaise as part of “Fete De La Photo 2014 — A Photo Festival in Public Space” — in which science meets art, sits in perfect harmony with the space. Ajay Talwar, one of the few astrophotographers in India, talks about practicing this niche genre.

On astrophotography in India

Its popularity is growing at a good pace because of digital SLR. There are about 200-300 practitioners of it because digital SLR allows long exposures and full control over apertures. You have to expose your photograph for the right time to create star trails and that’s how you get an image. When I started 27 years ago, we used to shoot on film and we would come to know of our mistakes only later and it would take long to correct it. Amateur Astronomer Association of Nehru Planetarium (Talwar is its vice-president) has also popularised the genre. Members discuss different aspects of astronomy there.

On the technique

(Temple Moon Full Rise)

While in the daytime everything is done by the camera itself, when you are shooting at night, the photographer has to do a lot of things. The focus, the framing and the exposure, you have to decide everything. To do something like star trails, you have to keep shooting long exposure, say about 30 seconds through the night, but at Nanda Devi where the shoot lasted for three hours, I kept exposing for two minutes. It was a cold night and three cameras with timer remotes attached to them were placed at different locations. It is an interesting experience because the photographer spending the whole night beneath the sky can see it move.

Shooting night landscapes like I do doesn’t require telescope but yes when I do deep sky objects, I do work with telescopes. Otherwise I shoot on 35 mm lens, 50 mm lens or 200 mm lens in special cases like my image of moonrise above the Kalkaji temple. I was one-and-a-half kilometres away from the temple in a house in Sant Nagar. I had to plan the shoot in advance because I had to calculate the day and the time of such an alignment between the moon and the temple.

On bringing the human element into his photographs

The structures, temples and human presence entered my frame after I was invited by TWAN (The World at Night), a platform for photographers who shoot earth and sky in the night. I realised that to get people to relate to this world, it is important to have a relatable presence. Viewers are very receptive to such images. In the “Dolly and Pankaj” image which has become very popular, it is just my friend sitting under the sky at Hatu Peak in Narkanda, Himachal Pradesh, against the moving stars captured through exposures. I would tell my friend to stay still for five minutes, then ten minutes and then fifteen minutes in such biting cold.

Future projects

India’s largest optical telescope is coming up at Devasthal in Nainital and I have been documenting its creation. So I plan on doing a time-lapse video on it.

(Report by Shailaja Tripathi for The Hindu)

Mythologies, The Art Critic, Achrome and more..

NEWS

Mythologies

Project 88, Mumbai presents a solo exhibition of legendary artist KG Subramanyan’s works. The show is titled,‘Mythologies’ and coincides with the 25th anniversary of Galerie 88, Kolkata.

On display will be some of the artist’s gouache on paper works. The show previews on 13th February 2014 at 6:00 -9:00 pm.

The show is on view from 14th February to 6th of March 2014.

The Art Critic

Spaces, Chennai, presents a launch, of the book titled ’The Art Critic’ written by Richard Bartholomew. The book focuses on his writing on art from the 1950s to the 1980s.

IThe book will be introduced by Pablo Bartholomew with choice extracts read by Rosalyn D'Mello, followed by a discussion titled "The Politics of Art," with Sadanand Menon, Vishwanadhan, and S.G. Vasudev.

The discussion deals with what constitutes the mainstream and what conspiratorial forces sideline artists to the fringe? Prejudicial hegemonies decide the legacies that remain and those that are subdued, resulting in a convoluted art history rife with gaps. Artists S.G. Vasudev and V. Vishwanadhan will speak about their experience of the politics of art, while drawing on and dialoguing with Richard Bartholomew's extensive writing on the subject in his posthumously published book ‘The Art Critic’.

The book launch will take place on 11th February 2014 between 6:30 to 7:45 pm.

Achrome- One by One

India Fine Art Gallery, Mumbai presents an exclusive exhibition of works of a group of contemporary artists of today. The show is titled as ‘Achrome - One by One’,and this group  show will feature the works by Gunjan - Rahul, Kavita Jaiswal, Nupur Kundu and Rahul Kumar. The works on display are a depiction of their creativity and variety of styles and mediums explored and are a must see.

The show is on view from 12th February 2014 to 28th February 2014.

Tao turns 14

Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai presents its 14th anniversary show. The show titled ‘Infinite Tao’ is a celebration of the completion of 14 years of the gallery.

The group of artists chosen have been part of those years of the gallery’s shows, solos and group shows. The show displays an array of works, from charcoal drawings to paintings and sculptures. 
Participating artists are, Akash Choyal, Ali Akbar Mehta,Anwar, Arunanshu Chowdhury, Arzan Khambatta, Bharti Pitre, Brinda Miller, C Jagdish, Debashish Dutta, Devdatta Padekar, Dhruvi Acharya, Heeral Trivedi, Indrajit Prasad, Jagdish Chander, Jaideep Mehrotra, Jayasri Burman, KG Subramanyan, KS Radhakrishnan, Kalpana Shah, Kantikishore Moharana, Karl Antao, Krishen Khanna, Madhvi Parekh, Mahendra Bhagat, Manu Parekh, Mrinal Dey, Nanda Das, Paresh Maity, Prabhakar Kolte, Ratan Krishna Saha, Ratnadeep Adivrekar, Ravi Mandlik, Rini Dhumal, S H Raza, Samir Mondal,  Sanjay Kumar, Seema Kohli, Senaka Senanayake, Sohan Qadri, Somenath Maity, Shipra Bhattacharya, Shuvaprasanna, Sujata Bajaj, Sunil Padwal, Suryaprakash, Venkatesh Pate, Vijay Shinde and Yashwant Deshmukh.

The show previews on 12th February 2014, 7:00 pm onwards and is n view till 5th March 2014.

(News Reports by Sushma Sabnis)


FEATURE

The many layers of faith

Once called the ‘best-kept secret’ of the art fraternity, V. Ramesh is showing at a solo exhibition in Bangalore.

(Poet Karaikalamma)

V. Ramesh’s disarming warmth and graciousness at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Bangalore, set the tone for the discussion of his solo exhibition, the first ever solo show by a living artist at the museum.

Consisting mostly of large canvases painted over a decade, Remembrances of Voices Past communicates Ramesh’s transcendental concerns of faith, devotion, and the essential oneness of being.

The artist’s unusual subject matter explores the idea of modern faith intertwined with ancient scriptures. Borrowing from mythology that describes human distraction caused by desire, his early series titled A Thousand and One Desires uses figuration to depict his ideas. In the painting A Thousand and One Desires, 2003, the central figure in the garb of a monk is surrounded by multiple gesticulating hands to denote greed and avarice. At the bottom of the painting is bold red text from American novelist Kurt Vonnegut ‘Grab much too much’, to denote blatant capitalist acquisition.

Yet, important as it is that a contemporary artist recontextualises and reiterates the essence of human values, Ramesh’s early figurative work falls short of narrative punch or engagement at a deeper level. Straightforward allegory in this work and in Building Castles in the Air, 2012, based on a Persian painting, seems less conducive towards evoking multiple layers of interpretation, or an awareness of who one is not in order to see who one might become.

Ramesh’s recent series Sanctum Sanctorum: A Corner for Four Sisters is inspired by four female figures. Hailing from different geographical and historical periods, these poet-saints come together through their renunciation of worldly ties. Here, one is not only fascinated by the artist’s retrieval of these long-forgotten figureheads and their defiance of tradition as early as the fifth century in their search for a higher truth, one is also moved by the subtlety and depth of Ramesh’s interpretation.

( Artist V Ramesh)

Karaikal Amma, 2012, pays homage to the Tamil saint whose sketchy, skeletal figure seeks a boon to appear as an ugly woman and be released from corporal needs. Covered with Tamil poetry and the hint of a more full-bodied female figure in the background, the painting encourages a discovery of meaning that begins the process of self-discovery, even self-transformation. Similarly, Remembering Laila Moj, 2011, is layered with different colours that suggest movement beneath the densely packed surface that’s filled with an English translation of the 14 century poet’s Kashmiri poetry. The technique of layering becomes paramount to the endlessly interpretable quality of the work.

The layering is best communicated in The Poet’s Passion series made up of four watercolours and four oil canvases. Alluding to 8 century poet-saint Manivachakar, the paintings alternate between joy and sorrow, earthly desire and spiritual realisation. Deep reds and oranges and the faint outline of female goddesses evoke the earth tones and intricacy of Ajanta and Ellora paintings.

In the diptych titled The Woods, 2012, two brightly-lit single-point perspectives suggest illumination at the end of the path of inquiry. Reminiscent of a forest, though not clearly defined, the multiple layers of thick brown and green paint convey the metaphor of impenetrability. Uncluttered by undue imagery, these works serve well to lure the viewer to go beyond the physical presence of the painting. In Untitled, 2006, Ramana Maharishi’s face is visible as the rest of his body merges with the landscape. As Gayatri Sinha points out in her informative essay in the catalogue, the painting is “emblematic of non-duality and the advaita of man and his natural environs”.

Ultimately, Ramesh’s oeuvre raises important questions about his place in contemporary Indian art. His body of work focused on spirituality certainly creates a locus of identity, and reflect his belief to “root myself in specific cultural and geographical location”. Although some of his allegorical canvases appear less successful, his denser paintings divested of pictography allow viewers to be provoked into testing the validity of their own ideas. At the end, Ramesh’s place will be determined by the ceaselessly contestable and interpretable aspect of his art. Remembrances of Voices Past: The solo show by V. Ramesh will be on till March 30 at the NGMA, Bangalore

( Report by Bansie Vasvani for The Hindu)