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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.

The city was consolidated over the course of the eighteenth century, and its access to global trade routes helped it grow over the following centuries as well, leading some to describe it as the 'door of the East with its Face to the West'. How did European artists view this growing city?

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.

Much of Indian modernism is enriched by the work that some of its best known artists produced after they had left the country, choosing as home another land. F. N. Souza was among the first to leave, in 1949, to head for London, where a successful practice catapulted him to the top of Britain’s artists. He was followed, in 1950, by S. H. Raza, who settled in Paris, winning the coveted critics’ award (Prix de la critique) in 1956, while others such as Krishna Reddy (Paris and New York), S. K. Bakre (London), Sakti Burman (Paris), Avinash Chandra (London and New York), Mohan Samant (New York), Natvar Bhavsar (New York), V. Viswanadhan (Paris), Sohan Qadri (Copenhagen), Rajendra Dhawan (Paris), Eric Bowen (Oslo), Ambadas (Oslo), and Zarina Hashmi (New York), followed in the 1950s-70s. These fourteen artists, with their diverse styles and concerns in art making, are masters lauded for the sheer range of responses to their environment that their work has registered. However, the question this exhibition forefronts, as its curator Kishore Singh asks, is: ‘Does the artist’s ethnic identity mean art too has an ethnic identity?’ Ambadas Avinash Chandra Eric Bowen F. N. Souza Krishna Reddy Mohan Samant Natvar Bhavsar Rajendra Dhawan S. H. Raza S. K. Bakre Sakti Burman Sohan Qadri V. Viswanadhan Zarina Hashmi

For Shanti Dave, creativity is a consistent and persistent exploration of the word or akshara—a term defined in the Natyashastra as a stroke in musical notes—which he perceives as the source of all creation. Dave’s abstract iconography, beginning in the early 1950s, adapted to modernism, aesthetic continuity and transcultural exchange. He altered, rejected and improvised the archaic image into a resonant form resembling an ancient script.

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.

He was the colossus of the Indian art world whose reign over twentieth-century modern art remains unparalleled. M. F. Husain (1913-2011) was the face of Indian modernism and owned it completely. Having started out as a painter of billboards in Bombay, he became its unchallenged monarch as a member of the influential Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947. He claimed the first National Award instituted by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1955, and went on to become India’s most celebrated artist. In a practice that spanned over seventy years, Husain was playful, experimental, provocative, controversial—but never mediocre.