Search results for: 'serigraph varanasi m.f. husain'

It is strange that Natvar Bhavsar, one of Indian art’s leading names, should never have been shown in India before. Having lived and worked in USA from 1962 onwards, it remains a mystery why his work has been seen in America but almost not at all in India. In spite of a few eminent collectors who have his work, Bhavsar has remained inexplicably ignored—an anomaly DAG is happy to correct with this seminal exhibition.

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An unassuming trailblazer, Gulam Rasool Santosh is the most important artist from the movement known as neo-tantra in Indian art, synonymous with masters such as Biren De and Sohan Qadri. Self-taught, Santosh began his career painting landscapes in his native Kashmir before being spotted by S. H. Raza, which enabled him to study at the Maharaja Sayajirao University at Baroda under the famous artist N. S. Bendre. After a few years of painting figurative and abstract works in the mould of the other Indian Progressives, Santosh’s art changed dramatically towards tantra when he had a mystical experience in the Amarnath cave in 1964. From then on, until his death in 1997, G. R. Santosh dedicated his life to the study and practice of tantra, a yogi as much as an artist.

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In the articulation of twentieth century art, where does one place Altaf Mohamedi? That question has probably troubled more curators than we realise. Altaf, who studied art in London before returning to Bombay (now Mumbai) was following in the footsteps of his elder sister and artist Nasreen Mohamedi, but that is where all similarities ended. Where Nasreen was an abstract, sparse artist who created a distinctive language using, for most part, rigid, inflexible lines that nevertheless sang on the paper over which they were made, Altaf’s work was intensely political and social.

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The Art of Santiniketan showcases the work of its four chief artists—Santiniketan’s founder, Rabindranath Tagore, its first principal and the architect of the Santiniketan pedagogy, Nandalal Bose, and his two illustrious students who went on to make a name for themselves as highly original and significant artists—Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij. Santiniketan was a path-breaking educational institution Rabindranath Tagore set up in rural Bengal in the early twentieth century, and the exhibition begins by examining its genesis in Tagore’s radical ideas of basing education in freedom and in the midst of nature. Benode Behari Mukherjee Nandalal Bose Rabindranath Tagore Ramkinkar Baij

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The mid-twentieth century saw a churn in the practice of art in India with a number of artists beginning to explore a genre that had swept the West with its absence of figuration in favour of abstraction. The non-representational began to gain traction as artists found within it a way to express themselves purely through colour as a potent tool to communicate emotions. Abstraction emphasised the relationship between originality and expression in ways that were complex, leading one to debate about the eventual goal of art. Ambadas, Krishna Reddy, Sohan Qadri, Zarina Hashmi, Rajendra Dhawan

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With the cultural calendar being packed till spring, join us as we travel through some of the most popular ongoing or upcoming art fairs and biennales. Take a close look at artists who bring modernist ideas to the contemporary art context. With some ubiquitous names from the twentieth century art world accompanied by a few of those that have been historically overlooked, discover how ideas around the Modern have evolved through these fairs and biennales, as we focus on notable artists from each art festival and delve into their practice.

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‘March to Freedom’, DAG’s acclaimed exhibition on the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, opens in Delhi with ‘Dastan-e-Gandhi', an evocative dastangoi performance written by Danish Iqbal and performed by Fouzia Dastango and and Ritesh Yadav, two of the leading artists of this tradition.

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A workshop for middle school educators on implementing an arts-led and project-based module for learners, using artworks and archival objects from ‘March to Freedom’, DAG’s historic exhibition on the 75th year of Indian Independence.

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The advent of abstraction is a defining moment in art history as we devise divisions between representational, figurative, and abstract art, with the need arising from this pivotal formal shift in the modern world. The term ‘figurative’ has come to represent an antithesis of sorts to the term abstract. One is representational of reality, the latter a derived (abstracted) representation or even non-representational (colour-field paintings for example).

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The medieval ages saw the rise in India and parts of Asia of philosophical, theological, cultural, literary and visual manifestations that derived from diverse faiths but with one aim—to attain enlightened liberation. Its resistance to Brahmanical texts and hegemony resulted in the creation of geometrical aesthetics that were interpreted by way of texts, paintings, and architecture and had a monumental impact on society. At the centre of its geometric configurations—the triangle, the square, and the circle—lay the idea of Creation itself, the source of primal energy that could to be diverted towards a higher consciousness, and all universe was manifest in this. Learn More

A guided walk of the exhibition with historian Prof Aparna Vaidik, Ashoka University, and Dr Giles Tillotson, SVP Exhibitions and Publications, DAG, exploring the lesser-known narratives of the Independence movement through art.

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What is the role of collectors and collections or archives in the world of art today? Does it simply allude to practices of producing a consumable past today or does it also aspire to question the ways in which history has been shaped by powerful interventions in the form of artworks, performances and installations?  In this series of conversations, we wanted to explore the idea of collecting recent or contemporary art—and how it inevitably takes us back to the moderns who influenced such practices heavily. 

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