Search results for: '20th century beng'

A talk by academician and author Prof. Dr. Vandana Bhandari on Costumes and Textiles from the 18th Century Mysore. Learn More

Have you wondered how people looked at paintings and photographs in the nineteenth century? For DAG’s annual Heritage Festival ‘The City as a Museum’, we explored various aspects of the city’s visual culture. As we are about to launch the DAG Journal let us revisit the walk co-led by Sarbajit Mitra and Amreeta Das at the Uttarpara Jaykrishna public library to delve into the periodical archive and trace the evolution of printed pictures in India. Flipping through the pages of these periodicals offered glimpses into the everyday habits of consuming art—from simple wood-cut and lithograph illustrations, to full plate colour reproductions of paintings and photographs, artist albums, and exquisitely ornate typography.

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With the cultural calendar being packed till spring, join us as we travel through some of the most popular ongoing or upcoming art fairs and biennales. Take a close look at artists who bring modernist ideas to the contemporary art context. With some ubiquitous names from the twentieth century art world accompanied by a few of those that have been historically overlooked, discover how ideas around the Modern have evolved through these fairs and biennales, as we focus on notable artists from each art festival and delve into their practice.

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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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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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The medieval ages saw the rise in India and parts of Asia of philosophical, theological, cultural, literary and visual manifestations that derived from diverse faiths but with one aim—to attain enlightened liberation. Its resistance to Brahmanical texts and hegemony resulted in the creation of geometrical aesthetics that were interpreted by way of texts, paintings, and architecture and had a monumental impact on society. At the centre of its geometric configurations—the triangle, the square, and the circle—lay the idea of Creation itself, the source of primal energy that could to be diverted towards a higher consciousness, and all universe was manifest in this. Learn More

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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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Feminist collective Samuho navigates the interplay between the interior and exterior lives of women at the cusp of nineteenth century reform movements through a performance-installation inspired by Shreepantha’s Keyabat Meye and the tradition of Prahasan.

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Feminist collective Samuho navigates the interplay between the interior and exterior lives of women at the cusp of nineteenth century reform movements through a performance-installation inspired by Shreepantha’s Keyabat Meye and the tradition of Prahasan.

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