Search results for: 'Kanye West – Christmas in Harlem'

Indian modernism is rich in diversity with a dizzying succession of artists who have each carved a niche for themselves in the rich firmament of art practice in the country. Open to influences from the West, reaching deep into the roots of their own culture, exploring and experimenting across mediums, absorbing ideas, reinterpreting established norms, Indian art defies any easily tailored silos to carve for itself a confident assertion of its own identity within a global context, while being a part of its larger assimilative journey.

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In a career spanning four decades, Amitava’s location as an artist has determined the authority that he brings to his practice. As an artist studying and working in the 1960s, Amitava Das experienced a decade of fragmented locii. The ’60s, the period of his education at the College of Art, was the decade of wars, fiscal difficulty and an uncertain polity in the wake of the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. Further, as a second generation pravasi (non-residing Indian) Bengali, the roiling political violence of West Bengal’s Naxal movement came to him through the filter of poetry, film and art—much as he would have received the existential writing of Camus, Genet and Rilke. Through the 1960s and ’70s, small groups of artists and filmmakers in different pockets in India had a heightened response: the state of the nation found an uncanny echo in the language of modernism, of the artist’s isolation and purity even within a state of uncertainty.

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Art Lab by DAG’s Museums Programme is a pop-up art exhibition of facsimiles of works from the DAG Museum Collection that travels to schools and introduces students to modes of visual learning. After two successful iterations in CBSE and ICSE schools in Kolkata, Art Lab travelled to its first Bengali medium West Bengal Board school—Barisha Janakalyan Vidyapith for Girls. Through three days of workshops spread across two weeks, the students interacted with the artworks, learnt the basics of research, delved into historical material, and developed their own creative projects. Take a peek at some of the wonderful projects they curated as they took over the exhibition and made it their own.

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Artist and institution-builder Shuvaprasanna’s residence is located in a leafy corner of Kolkata’s suburban township, Bidhannagar or ‘Salt lake City’, which was envisaged by the former Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy in the late 1950s. Having grown up elsewhere—in College Street, in fact—the artist only moved here in 2002-03 with his family, which included his wife and fellow-artist, Shipra Bhattacharya. In this photo-essay we will learn about Shuvaprasanna’s personal collection and the relationship between his collecting practices and his art-making.

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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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The city was consolidated over the course of the eighteenth century, and its access to global trade routes helped it grow over the following centuries as well, leading some to describe it as the 'door of the East with its Face to the West'. How did European artists view this growing city?

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By the end of the century, however, the scene was changing, and infrastructure—following the economic reforms in 1991—began to improve, creating an interest in collecting art. Twentieth century Indian modern art has since been at the forefront of collecting and investing in Indian art, and DAG, which has the largest private collection of Indian art has a marked focus on this period of Indian art. Ambadas F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh George Keyt Jamini Roy K. K. Hebbar Kanwal Krishna Laxman Pai M. F. Husain M. F. Pithawalla M. V. Dhurandhar Madhvi Parekh Nandalal Bose Nemai Ghosh Prokash Karmakar Rabin Mondal

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Spanning five decades of her painterly career, this retrospective includes iconic works by Madhvi Parekh which represent every phase of her illustrious career. The show also includes rare drawings and paintings from the 1960s, when the influence of Paul Klee’s abstraction on her early work was evident. Given the solid representation of Parekh’s paintings from every decade, the exhibition allows viewers to see the continuity in her vision and focus.

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Indra Dugar, unlike his illustrious father Hirachand Dugar (1898-1951), did not have any formal education in art. Born in 1918 in Jiaganj in Murshidabad, West Bengal, he sub-consciously absorbed the artistic ambience of Santiniketan where he grew up; his father was one of the earliest students at Kala Bhavana at the Visva-Bharati University. Dugar acquired art skills from his father and considered Santiniketan his alma mater. He was inspired by his father’s mentor Nandalal Bose, who saw great promise in him. Learn More

Rabin Mondal is like a striding colossus of our times, scorching up the firmament with images that reflect societal malaise and his own inner turmoil. His determination to paint in a market-unfriendly manner is characteristic of his resolve. His canvases provide no safety net for the unwary viewer. Here is a confident artist aware of his self and his role with no fig leaf to offer those seeking beauty in art—not that his work is unbeautiful.

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New York-based, Indian artist Natvar Bhavsar has been one of the most important painters of his generation. Influenced by the colour field artists of America in the 1960s, he became acquainted with them and took their language forward in his unique manner. A celebrated international artist, Bhavsar’s works have been widely collected by institutions and museums in America and the West.

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For its debut in London, DAG created a booth-in-booth display space at the historical exhibition venue, Olympia London, that offered glimpses of the artworks from all around, thereby improving its visibility and attracting visitors. Its choice of art too reflected the best from its collection of the twentieth century modern masters of Indian art, who, in turn, had been influenced by movements and artists in the West. Several of these had worked, briefly or for the duration of their careers, in London and Europe. These included Avinash Chandra, F. N. Souza, Ram Kumar, S. H. Raza, Laxman Pai, Manjit Bawa,
S. K. Bakre, Sakti Burman and Sohan Qadri among others. The room within the booth was reserved solely for the paintings by F. N. Souza. Akbar Padamsee Ambadas Anjolie Ela Menon Avinash Chandra B. Prabha Bikash Bhattacharjee Dharamnarayan Dasgupta F. N. Souza G.R. Santosh George Keyt Himmat Shah J. Sultan Ali Jogen Chowdhury K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud Krishen Khanna Laxman Pai M. F. Husain Manjit Bawa N. S. Bendre P. T. Reddy Prodosh Das Gupta Rabin Mondal Ram Kumar S. H. Raza S. K. Bakre Sakti Burman Sohan Qadri Sunil Das

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