Search results for: 'WASH PAINTING IN IND'

What does it take to liberate a woman’s figure from patriarchal gaze? Courage and conviction, perhaps, as artist Vasundhara Tewari Broota shares in this short interview. Speaking from the experience of painting with courage, the artist also provides a peek into her thought process.

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The Devi or the female power in Hindu mythology appears in various avatars in our everyday lives—as idols during the puja, on covers of magazines, product labels, calendars and posters. The modern history of visualising the Devi goes back to naturalistic depictions in oil paintings by the Early Bengal artists, which were surpassed in popularity and fame by Raja Ravi Varma and his studio. His representation, however, was regarded as too human-like by artists of the Bengal School in the early twentieth century, who created idealised forms based on a synthesis of classical visual traditions. In the twentieth century, we find artists responding to distinctive traits of the goddess to portray specific aspects of her power, or to convey the artist's own relationship with divinity. Few artists who have turned to Hindu myths have been able to escape the temptation to interpret the female power in their own way, and the diversity in style, medium, and mood is a testament to that.

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Drawing from the Greek word skhedios, meaning ‘to extemporize’, the sketch presents an interiorized, psychological landscape against classical painting’s heroic, externalized construction of the painted tableau. For many artists, sketching and drawing suggest initial explorations for capturing moods, relations and subjectivities that can be expanded through later applications of paint and texture.

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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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‘Navtar Bhavsar: Cosmic Whispers’ opened on 1 March, featuring the art’s artworks which contributed to significantly to the discourse on abstractionism in New York and beyond. As part of the exhibition, Navtar Bhavsar speaks on working within the art scene in New York in the 1960s and his various points of reference rooted in Indian culture. Learn More

G. R. Santosh created a hugely accomplished career without formal training in art. His abstract paintings made in the early 1960s had Kashmir as his muse, and often used encaustic and beeswax—a process he learned from Shanti Dave. Architect and designer Pinakin Patel shares his views about In the Snows of Kashmir, Santosh’s masterful painting with textural relief in a monochrome palette.

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Curator Jesal Thacker and art writer Meera Menezes speak about Shanti Dave’s art practice and choice of medium that allowed several elements to come together in his encaustic paintings and layered watercolours.

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A well-known poet and essayist, Prayag Shukla is also one the foremost writers on art in Hindi. He has authored monographs on artists like J. Swaminathan, M. F. Husain and Ambadas, expanding upon these artists’ relationships with local institutions and contexts of art-making in India since the 1960s.

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Colonization is perhaps best understood as a process that unfolded over time than as a single historical event. In India and South Asia it began with the East India Company acquiring rights over land in different parts of the country, with the occasional political victories won on the battlefields. Since the Battle of Plassey (1757), their power over legislative and judicial matters grew steadily, backed by a strong military presence. Following the First War of Independence in 1857, the British Crown brought most parts of the Indian subcontinent under its direct rule, continuing to hold power until 1947.

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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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Do we view things differently as we grow older? What are the perspectives that matter most when viewing art? Do we see things differently as men and women? Do we see art differently as men and women? How does one’s gender impact the creation of art? In the months leading up to ‘Ways of Seeing’, these were some of the questions we posed to ourselves, and we wish we could say that we found a generic, universal response, for there are as many standpoints and views as there are viewers and people. Amrita Sher-Gil Anjolie Ela Menon Anupam Sud Arpana Caur B. Prabha Devayani Krishna Elizabeth Brunner Gogi Saroj Pal Jaya Ganguly Kanchan Chander Kavita Nayar Latika Katt Madhvi Parekh Mrinalini Mukherjee Nalini Malani Navjot Nilima Sheikh Rekha Rodwittiya Shobha Broota Sunayani Devi Vasundhara Tewari Broota Zarina Hashmi Akbar Padamsee Avinash Chandra B. C. Sanyal Baburao Painter Bikash Bhattacharjee D. P. Roy Chowdhury Dharamanarayan Dasgupta Dhruva Mistry F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh Ganesh Pyne George Keyt Haren Das Jagadish Dey Jamini Roy Jogen Chowdhury Jyoti Bhatt K. H. Ara K. S. Kulkarni Khagen Roy Krishen Khanna M. F. Husain M. Suriyamoorthy M. V. Dhurandhar Nandalal Bose P. T. Reddy Prokash Karmakar Sakti Burman Satish Sinha Sudhir Khastgir Sunil Das V. Nageshkar

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