From Munnar in Kerala to Mumbai—an artist takes conventional stereotypes—breaks them and finds ways of creating permutations and combinations that create a synergy of Pollockian canvasses filled with conversations about the complexities of life's multiple frameworks. You get the cramped in convolutions of the brilliant artist P R...
India's first-ever contemporary sculpture park has launched its second edition. The not-for-profit project, inaugurated in December 2017, transformed the Madhavendra Palace in Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, into an expansive sculpture gallery. The sculptures are displayed throughout the majestic rooms and grand courtyards of the 18th-century fortress...
In the film I am Twenty (1967) by Indian filmmaker S. N. S. Sastry, the narrator asks a group of young men and women – all of whom were born on 15 August 1947 (the day of Indian Independence) – how they feel about the 20-year-old nation state of India. A young man with a mop-top, unimpressed by the question, replies: 'I don't have any love for the...
While the residents of this home, evidently furnished according to middle-class taste, are never to be seen, the paintings do not seem de-peopled. In fact, there is a sense of intimacy that Karmakar creates through the eight paintings that will be on view at Colaba's Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke Tuesday evening onwards. "You enter...
Kaushik's generation (he was born in 1989) has been hit rather hard with a number of dilemmas. Born at a time when the old certainties of the bi-polar world were giving way to a unipolar world he grew up in a society that was enmeshed in a mind numbing cacophony produced by the ease of telecommunication, internet proliferation, electronic media...
Gieve Patel's recent exhibition of paintings, Footboard Rider at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (2017), carries forward his lifelong preoccupations with the marginal figure, the intimations of the transcendental conveyed by the experience of looking at clouds or into wells, and the conditions of extremity and vulnerability attendant...
Guest curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty, the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), titled Forming in the pupil of an eye, is an assembly of artist-created realities. Shetty outlines his curatorial concept with the story of a young traveler who went on a long journey to meet a sage. When he reaches her, 'the Sage assimilates the...
In some of Gauri Gill's most telling images — as one has seen in the Birth Series (2006), or Balika Mela (2003/2010) — the human form has been at the centre of her work. "I love people and they have been present in almost all my work, but this is a departure," says the Delhi-based photographer, hours before her...
Gauri Gill is one of the most thoughtful photographers active in India today. Her work is inspired by an ethic of seeing and making that struggles against the documentary photographer’s sovereign gaze – a gaze that despite its claim to objectivity dominates its subjects and the manner in which they are represented. To address this...
With most galleries opting to display a rather safe selection of artwork of ‘saleable artists’, the fair lacked an element of freshness and missed those few moments of surprise. Nevertheless, the selection of art on show provided a level of comfort for both the uninitiated collector and for the existing contemporary art collector....
One of the first things Zain Masud, the 32-year-old International Director of the India Art Fair, fresh off her stint in Dubai, and traveling between Beijing, Moscow and London in her personal space, did on taking charge of the 2016 event, is to draw geographical boundaries for the platform it provides. For the first time, Nepal, Bhutan...
Rashid Rana’s art is all about the “shock and awe” effect. Look at The Veil series — arguably his most famous work — and you’ll see a woman in a burkha. Look closer, and you’ll notice that thousands of blurred pornographic shots form its tapestry. When Rana premiered this series at Delhi’s Nature...