Search results for: 'Kali reverance a'

The nude. Just the term sends a frisson of excitement down the spine in most people. For the few of us who are part of the art fraternity, however, more than just the anticipation of being able to view the human body as an artistic work in its many forms and avatars, its beauty and its degradation both, is the true mark of an artist’s genius. And yet, the history of the nude in Indian art has remained curiously unmapped. A. A. Almelkar A. A. Raiba A. P. Bagchi A. Ramachandran Abalall Rahiman Akbar Padamsee Anita Roychowdhury Anupam Sud Avinash Chandra B. Prabha B.Vithal Bengal School (Anonymous) Bikash Bhattacharjee Chintamoni Kar Chittaprosad F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh George Keyt Gogi Saroj Pal Gopal Ghose Hemendranath Majumdar J. Sultan Ali Jamini Roy Jaya Ganguly Jehangir Sabavala Jeram Patel Jogen Chowdhury Jyoti Bhatt K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud K. S. Kulkarni L. Munuswamy Laxman Pai M. F. Husain M. R. Acharaker Madhav Bhattacharjee Maniklal Banerjee Nalini Malani Navjot Nikhil Biswas P. Khemraj P. T. Reddy Prodosh Das Gupta Prokash Karmakar R.Vijaivargiya Rabin Mondal Radha Charan Bagchi Rameshwar Broota Ramkinkar Baij Ranbir Kaleka Ravi Varma Press Rekha Rodwittiya S. Dhanapal Sakti Burman Satish Sinha Sudhir Khastgir Suhas Roy Sunil Das Sunil Madhav Sen Surendran Nair V. Nageshkar Ved Nayar

Learn More

India’s Rockefeller Artists showcases iconic works of the Indian painters and sculptors who travelled to the US on philanthropic grants from the JDR 3rd Fund (1963–1979) and later through the Asian Cultural Council. These artists were exposed to American art and shared their own learnings and experiences through these enriching cultural exchanges. The show examines how and why these artists were selected; their relationships with each other and the American art milieu; the impact of the experience on their work; and the creation of a community of Rockefeller artists.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

European artists and architects were deeply influenced by the rich cultural heritage and artistic traditions of India, which, in turn, influenced their architectural designs. Artistic representations served as a bridge between cultures, leading to the incorporation of Indian motifs, styles, and decorative elements in colonial architecture. Learn More

Historian and author Manu S. Pillai in conversation with art historian and curator Giles Tillotson on the subject of Tipu Sultan in the context of DAG’s exhibition, 'Tipu Sultan: Image and Distance' Learn More

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

Learn More

Prabhakar Barwe (1936-95) could well have ended up a theoretician whose book 'Kora Canvas' (Blank Canvas) was a manifesto that established the multi-dimensional relationship between an artist, the object on which he paints, and his subjects. That he was not just an intellectual scholar but an artist whose work speaks for him, is evident through a range of works in which Barwe dissects our understanding of the world and how we view it. Taking commonplace objects and our perception of their existence in the space they occupy, he shifts the dialogue to a point of discomfiture that makes us question our understanding of them. Using scale, discordant juxtapositions, and displacements, he reimagines the everyday in a manner that is thought-provoking, even provocative, as alternate realities—whether perceived or imagined.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

England shaped Altaf’s political consciousness as well as his persona. He engaged in the anti-apartheid demonstration at Trafalgar Square held against the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela; a peaceful protest at the American Embassy opposing the bombing in North Vietnam; the Aldermaston March against the nuclear bomb; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; he became a member of the Youth Wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Young Communist League (YCL). Any examination of the theoretical aspect of Altaf’s work must start with the knowledge that the work in question exemplified an element of ‘existentialist’ thought. 

Learn More

Few artists claim as rich and intriguing a legacy as M. V. Dhurandhar in the landscape of late 19th and early 20th century Indian art. His practice leaves us with challenging questions about encounters and exchanges with India's colonial past and the influence of Europeans in shaping the evolution of painting. This exhibition revisits Dhurandhar's vast oeuvre through DAG's extensive collection of his paintings, archival material and ephemera, in an attempt to understand the socio-cultural context of his emergence, and to re-examine his influence on institutional and commercial art in the country.

Learn More