Search results for: 'Books on the visual history of modern Indian art'

At first glance, J. Swaminathan’s paintings appear disarmingly simple. The longer you look, the more expansive they become.

In this work from his celebrated Bird, Tree Series, Swaminathan reduces the landscape to its elemental forms—a bird, a tree, a glowing field of colour—creating a visual language that feels at once primal, meditative, and strikingly modern. Painted during the 1980s, the work belongs to a significant phase in the artist’s practice when he moved away from illusionistic depth and towards flattened forms, symbolic motifs, and intuitive space.

For Swaminathan, art was not bound by ideology or narrative, but offered a way of experiencing life itself. The bird and tree here are more than natural forms; they become quiet cosmic presences suspended within a luminous red expanse. Meaning emerges not through description, but through rhythm, colour, balance, and stillness.

Tipu Sultan’s historical legacy has led to several conversations, among which its visual inheritance has provided room for debate on its particularly skewed European view. Catch our guest speaker William Dalrymple’s reflections on this subject.

Photographer Nemai Ghosh has been the quintessential Satyajit Ray biographer through his decades-long close association with the master filmmaker. Over a lifetime of work, he has built up a vast and valuable photographic archive, now housed at DAG.