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India’s return to Singapore to participate in Art Stage Singapore 2016 was fuelled by the strong curiosity it aroused the previous year, and it built on the relationships it had developed in the region with a strong selection of artworks by reputed artists as well as masters. It proved a felicitous experience and consolidated the gains from its previous sales and was a success. As is its norm, the large DAG booth had a big number of Indian artists represented by their finest work. A. A. Almelkar Ambadas Anjolie Ela Menon Avinash Chandra Bikash Bhattacharjee Biren De Francis Newton Souza G. R. Santosh Ganesh Haloi George Keyt Gogi Saroj Pal Gopal Ghose H. A. Gade J. Sultan Ali Jeram Patel Jogen Chowdhury K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud Laxman Pai Madhvi Parekh Maqbool Fida Husain P. Khemraj P. T. Reddy Rabin Mondal Ram Kumar Sakti Burman Shanti Dave Shyamal Dutta Ray Sohan Qadri Somnath Hore Sunil Das Syed Hyder Raza

DAG’s debut at Art Basel Hong Kong aimed to provide an overview of the twentieth century Indian art, tracking key catalytic movements and introducing important masters and artists to an art audience unfamiliar with their work. This included the Progressives, of course, but also other modernists whose contribution to Indian art has been significant. The exhibition display at its large booth was aimed at maximising the number of paintings that could be displayed, including sculptures, and was accompanied by a catalogue. A. A. Raiba Akbar Padamsee Anjolie Ela Menon Avinash Chandra B. Prabha Bikash Bhattacharjee Biren De D. P. Roy Chowdhury F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh Ganesh Pyne Gogi Saroj Pal H. A. Gade Himmat Shah J. Sultan Ali Jogen Chowdhury K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud M. F. Husain P. T. Reddy Prodosh Das Gupta Prosanto Roy Ram Kumar S. Dhanapal S. H. Raza S. K. Bakre Sankho Chaudhuri Sohan Qadri Sunil Das

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.

DAG’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong at its second outing there consolidated its gains from the previous edition by building on the artists it had first presented at the seminal fair. It matched the fair’s focus of a vibrant Asian art with its premier selection of Indian modern art of the twentieth century. The selection presented twenty-five of the most significant Indian modern artists—consisting of painters and sculptors, figurative and abstract artists—who, with the innovations they brought to their art, contributed significantly to the rich diversity and expanse of Indian modern art as we know it today. Akbar Padamsee Ambadas Avinash Chandra B. Prabha Bikash Bhattacharjee Biren De F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh George Keyt Himmat Shah J. Sultan Ali K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud Krishen Khanna Laxman Pai M. F. Husain N. S. Bendre Rabin Mondal Ram Kumar S. H. Raza S. K. Bakre Sakti Burman Sohan Qadri Sunil Das

Given Singapore’s sizeable Indian population and its position as a leading financial centre, DAG’s debut at Art Stage Singapore was an obvious corollary. Indian artists are avidly collected in this city-state but DAG’s attempt, as always, was to introduce the masters to visitors at the fair. While keeping in mind the best modernists, it also curated a selection most likely to appeal to Eastern sensibilities—thereby displaying its range and the diversity of Indian art. Akbar Padamsee Ambadas Avinash Chandra B. Prabha Bikash Bhattacharjee Dhanraj Bhagat F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh Gogi Saroj Pal Himmat Shah J. Sultan Ali Jeram Patel K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar Laxman Pai M. F. Husain N. S. Bendre P. T. Reddy Paramjit Singh Prokash Karmakar Rabin Mondal Ram Kumar S. Dhanapal S. H. Raza Sakti Burman Sohan Qadri Sunil Das

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

This is the first-ever retrospective of the Indian modern artist Avinash Chandra who lived most of his life in the West, in London and New York. The artist, who had trained in New Delhi, left soon after for London, and most of his practice was limited to London and New York, the two cities he called his home till his unfortunately early death in 1991. In the roughly three-and-a-half decades of his career, Avinash’s work changed amazingly, reflecting his environment and milieu as he grew and adapted to cities vastly different from their Indian counterparts, with their own sub-cultures. That this happily coincided with a discovery of India, however superfluously, as a land of spirituality and sexuality, seemed to serve him well as his muse.

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.

One of India’s most important artists, Chittaprosad recorded pivotal political and social movements in the country, such as the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 and its fallout, in heart-wrenching sketches and drawings, alongside protests against colonialism, economic exploitation, urban poverty and depravity, just as beautifully as the many drawings, linocuts and scraper board illustrations he made for children, recording a beatific phase of plenitude and family values, and involving himself with marionettes for their entertainment.