Search results for: 'western artist absence of form'

'The City as a Museum' in an annual art and heritage festival by DAG's Museums Programme. The second edition returned to Kolkata to celebrate the city's rich history of artistic practices and exchange. We travelled across the city and beyond to heritage spaces, artists' homes, and rare collections through unique walks, workshops, talks, performances and more. Explore a snapshot of this journey through photographs by Parameshwar Halder.

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DAG in collaboration with ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) presents Drishyakala. An incredible array of over 400 artworks spread over 25,000 square ft. by India’s leading artists from the DAG collection—made all the more unique for its presentation within a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the Red Fort.

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What wonder it must have been for the people in England to ‘see’ India for the first time, the exotica that they had only heard of until then! The artists who made this possible through their paintings and aquatints were the uncle-nephew duo of Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, whose magnum opus, Oriental Scenery, was the subject of this landmark exhibition at Drishyakala, a joint collaboration between DAG and the Archaeological Survey of India.

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The Story of Bengal Art presents a panoramic view of the evolution of visual arts in the region. The final episode, presented by artist and academician, Prof. Chhatrapati Dutta, speaks of the fractious modernism that marks Bengal art in the mid and late 20th century. The series was shot in the majestic galleries of DAG's Ghare Baire museum-exhibition at Kolkata's Currency Building.

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The Story of Bengal Art presents a panoramic view of the evolution of visual arts in the region. The story of the first episode, presented by artist, academic, and curator, Dr. Paula Sengupta, begins in the late 18th century with the arrival of the first European traveling artists. The series was shot in the majestic galleries of DAG's Ghare Baire museum-exhibition at Kolkata's Currency Building. Learn More

As one of India’s most well-known artists, Tyeb Mehta still commands our attention for his commitment to experimentation. His ‘Diagonal series’ established him as a dynamic figure within the world of modern art, but how did this diagonal method come to be an important tool of composition in the last century? It all started with the invention of another compoitional tool called the 'rule of thirds'. Read below as we explore the origins of this artistic tool and see how it has evolved over time.

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Diana Campbell is the Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation, now in its 10th year, and chief curator of the prestigious Dhaka Art Summit, whose sixth edition starts on February 3, 2023. She spoke with the DAG Journal’s editorial team to discuss her own curatorial process and how she makes room for experimentation, and unpacks the intriguing thematic of this new edition: ‘flood’, or bonna.

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DAG Museum’s annual festival ‘The City as a Museum’ attempts to explore the various archives, communities and artistic traditions that cohere around the life of a city. Put together, they tell different stories about the city across time and space, from the point of view of neighbourhoods, collections and institutions, but not just limited to those either.

In order to learn more about this unique programme that seeks to explore heritage outside the walls of a traditional gallery or museum, read on!

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Chittaprosad (1915 – 1978) was an artist of the people. A firm believer in the power of political art to bring tangible change in society, he is remembered for political cartoons and caricatures lampooning the ruling elite while championing the cause of the working class.

He was also a dedicated journalist working for the Communist Party of India (CPI) and was sent by the party to document the effects of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 in Bengal’s villages and towns. He would come back with harrowing stories and sketches of hunger and death and publish them in the CPI’s journal People’s War, something that would prove to be extremely important in the face of British censorship on news about the famine.

Post-Independence, Chittaprosad distanced himself from the CPI due to ideological differences and moved to the outskirts of Bombay. He continued registering protest through his art but focussed increasingly on art for children. He setup a puppet studio, Khela-ghar and created beautiful retellings of epics and folk tales in print.

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Radha is painted as a queen in this Early Bengal oil painting, surrounded by her fellow Gopis (cowherds and companions) and Krishna—her divine consort and an incarnation of one of the Hindu trinity—dressed as a sentinel. She sits on her royal throne amid a forest landscape, perhaps recalling her identification as Vrindavaneshwari (goddess of Vrindavan). Going by the small but remarkable details of the jewellery, we can guess that it is the work of an artist trained in the miniature tradition. But does the painting hide other possible secrets?

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At the turn of the twentieth century, Abanindranath Tagore asked himself if the emerging artists of modern India should continue to paint in the manner of their European colonizers; or was there a new path waiting to be forged? His answers led him to envision a pan-Asian cultural identity, spanning traditions from Persia to Japan, and culminating in a ‘new “Indian” art.’ Regarded as the founder of the Bengal School, Abanindranath left an unparalleled legacy both in terms of his own diverse body of work, and through his pupils, like Nandalal Bose, who shaped the contours of art across the subcontinent in the twentieth century.

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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. it is this rich legacy of Indian modernism that we hope to explore with The Centum Series which opens a window to the tantalising glimpse of the extraoridnary depth and breadth of its scope and variety. Akhilesh J. Sultan Ali Altaf Ambadas Amit Ambalal Amitava Anonymous (Early Bengal) Dattatraya Apte Radha Charan Bagchi Ramkinkar Baij S. K. Bakre Prabhakar Barwe R. B. Bhaskaran Jyoti Bhatt Natvar Bhavsar Bikash Bhattacharjee Nikhil Biswas Nandalal Bose Shobha Broota Sakti Burman Avinash Chandra Chittaprosad Jagmohan Chopra Bijan Choudhary Jogen Chowdhury Anita Roy Chowdhury D. P. Roy Chowdhury Thomas Daniell Haren Das Sunil Das

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