Art Musings is proud to present a solo exhibition of Padma Vibhushan S H Raza, which opens on 22 March 2016, entitled Nirantar. In celebration of the artist’s 94th birthday, the exhibition will showcase recent works. This exhibition opens in three cities simultaneously, Mumbai, Delhi & Kolkata.
22.03.2016 – 30.04.2016
Sakti Burman (1935, Kolkata) returns to Mumbai after a gap of 9 years with a solo exhibition The Beholder’s Share, featuring recent oil on canvas works. The exhibition also showcases a small selection of sculptures, drawings and lithographs. Sakti has embraced two cultures and created his own unique world of fable, fantasy and myth, which has grown ever richer over the years. He draws inspiration from myriad sources, ranging from the Ajanta caves to the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. He combines imagery from India and Europe, and achieves a fusion of Indian patterns with colour preferences inherited from the fin-de-siecle Nabis and Fauves. His paintings evoke the dreamlike look of a time-encrusted fresco, achieved through the blending of oil and acrylic to produce a marbling effect. In the course of a distinguished career, Burman has received many honours, including the Prix des Etrangers, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris; the Medaille Arts, Science et Lettres, Paris; the Medaille d’Argent de Montmorency; the Medaille d’Or, Salon des Artistes Français, Grand Palais, Paris; and the Prix de la Ville de l’Isle-Adam, France. Burman’s works have found place in the collections of major museums and cultural institutions, including the British Museum, London; the Musée de la Ville, Paris; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the National Gallery, Auckland; the Punjab Museum, Chandigarh; the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Bombay; and the Ministry of Culture, Government of France, Paris.
10.02.2016 – 10.03.2016
In Focus Booth# D7, Art Musings is showcasing works by renowned artist S H Raza. Raza is the last surviving founder member of the Progressive Artists Group. Well into his nineties, he continues to be a questor for new horizons of significance. The Dheere Dheere series comprise of 15 small size paperworks, with his symbolic vocabulary and a system of geometrical interpretations. Booth # B15 features works by Anjolie Ela Menon, Baiju Parthan, Smriti Dixit, Raghava K K, Nilofer Suleman, Gopikrishna & S Nandagopal. Anjolie Ela Menon’s protagonists are mythological figures as well as the ordinary people. Her paintings, through their texture and stunning coloration, convey the wonder of breathtaking transmutations. Baiju Parthan believes data and the virtual space where it exists is a newly formed meta-reality. This meta space certainly has an aesthetic dimension that can be accessed as imagery through data visualization technology. In this work, he has used the traditional medium of canvas, paint, and compositional devices to address that aesthetic dimension and make data visible as imagery in a painting. The art of Smriti Dixit is born out of her experiences with everyday life. Drawing on intimate interactions, she fashions objects carefully, using handmade techniques, engaging in the tactility of her materials, becoming familiar with their specific properties. Here she presents a site specific installation in ceramic. Nilofer Suleman’s work is inspired by Indian typography and street graphics. Distinctions are found in the details of these flamboyant works, where the elements of fun and fantasy belie a more complex layered composition. Raghava‘s nonchalant and edgy pictorial vocabulary hints at a future, which engages with experimentation. The present suite of drawings is a whimsical exploration of our capacity to play many disembodied roles at once. Gopikrishna’s paintings appear as though they were pages from a book of fairytales. In his surrealistic canvas, one can witness the ordinary and the impossible, unity and solitude, illumination and darkness.Nandagopal’s narrative sculptural work in enamel, copper and brass feature traditional icons. While Nandagopal is an artist steeped in the traditions of his country, his work has a contemporary sensibility that appeals to an international taste.
01.02.2016 – 01.02.2016
Art Musings is presenting a solo exhibition by acclaimed artist Anjolie Ela Menon from 26 November – 31 December ’15. The show features recent works of oil on Masonite board. Anjolie is showcasing in Mumbai after a gap of 9 years, her last solo exhibition was held in Mumbai with Art Musings in 2006.
Over a journey that spans five decades and has taken her across the globe, Menon’s art has incorporated the resonances of many schools, diverse cultures. The present suite of paintings sees the artist’s revisit some of her favoured motifs. Menon charges her figures with the mandate of their hybrid identity. Her figures seem always like avatars travelling between the way stations of a quest. They carry within them the residues of other times, other civilizations, other ways of looking at the human form and preserving it for posterity, whether as a secular image or a votive icon.
26.11.2015 – 31.12.2015
Art Musings next exhibition Beloved features Shilo Shiv Suleman. Shilo is a visual artist with a focus on the intersection of magical realism, art for social change and technology. In recent years, she’s been engaging with biofeedback technology and the interaction between the body and art. Beloved is an exploration of Nature, Intimacy and Technology. The exhibition consists of works in several mediums, including gold-leaf encrusted wood-cut murals and watercolour paintings. The central piece of the exhibition is Brindavan, an interactive installation that uses breath to create a meditative and immersive experience. Says Shilo “When one falls in love, our relationship with nature is intensified. And Nature responds too, the wind caresses, the waves rise and fall and lap up against the shore; we are brushed by leaves and cradled by the earth. Through Beloved, I explore the hypothesis that perhaps the greater longing is to be united not just with the beloved, but with nature itself. In my explorations with Nature, Intimacy and the Body, I work with biofeedback technology to create interactive installations.”
17.10.2015 – 20.11.2015
Art Musings opens their upcoming exhibition, Ridiculous Copycats on 19 August 2015 with a solo exhibition featuring recent works by Raghava K K. This is Raghava’s fifth solo exhibition with Art Musings after That’s All Folks!, 2013, Exquisite Cadaver, 2011, Brooklyn Bound R-Train, 2009/10 and Drawn and Quartered in 2008. Raghava K K is a multi-disciplinary artist. He works in genres as disparate as painting, film, installation, iPad Art, interactive art and performance.
Ridiculous Copycats is a collection of ever increasingly complex panels of artwork that form a narrative much like a graphic novel. The narrative in the artworks follows the half-cycle of a complexity-simplicity sine-wave, telling a story from the imagining/birthing of a species to its dominance over other species and ultimately other worlds. The artworks look at the origin of diversity as arising from a slight deviance or error in code – genetic, industrial, and digital. This delta, over repeated, flawed copycat attempts, births societal complexity and dominance. It is the rise of greater individual difference that fragments the original pieces until they slowly reunite again. This breath-like movement between complexity and simplicity, between group and individual, is the pulse, and rhythm that ties all time, meaning and relevance into a knot of ever shifting identity.
19.08.2015 – 08.10.2015
Bangalore based artist, Nilofer Suleman opens her new solo Jantar Mantar opens with Art Musings on 27 July ‘15. Suleman is known for her ability to depict a certain vision of India, one that elicits humour and a sense of nostalgia. Her use of color is generous, an onslaught of competing tones. Within the compositions, references are made to popular pictures of Hindu deities, to film posters and shop signs. These are decorated with detail, peopled with famous idols of religion or popular culture- though the line between these is often unclear. Narrative and the intention of storytelling are central to Suleman’s artistic practice. Each painting is made around a mindmap, where the artist creates complex characters, existing in relation to one another. Posters contain multiple languages, and translations are often misspelled, a humorous nudge at the phonetic errors and ‘Indiansims’ found on signs. Suleman had carefully chosen these inclusions, using them as a point of entrance to her works.
29.07.2015 – 14.08.2015
Art Musings opens its 2015 edition of Quarto, a group exhibition featuring 4 renowned contemporary artists Baiju Parthan, Gopikrishna, Raghava K K, and Chittrovanu Mazumdar on 4 May 2015. The gallery will display important works from their archives, which are part of their permanent collection, along with recent paintings.
04.05.2015 – 20.07.2015
Art Musings is proud to present a solo exhibition of Padma Vibhushan S H Raza in celebration of his 93rd birthday, entitled Aarambh @ 93. In the course of a career spanning seven decades, Raza has dedicated himself to a quest for vital forms that convey his earliest memories of landscape and cosmic expanse, language and silence. The circle or ‘Bindu’ has become more of an icon, sacred in its symbolism, and placing his work in an Indian context. To Raza, painting is akin to the meditative practice of japa, the fully-engaged repetition of a mantra, until it is deepened and concentrated into a pathway of energy. Among Raza’s recent works, the artist includes among abstract shapes, words or letters which appear with symbolic hieroglyphs. The image of the Bindu remains an essential quotient in his paintings. He continues to consider its possibilities by repeating, fragmenting, excavating its form. By pushing his work towards a meditative space, Raza’s body of work engages in a timeless convergence between outer and inner worlds.
02.03.2015 – 15.04.2015
In Memory of Red, the artworks are not only a reflection of its maker’s interiority, but documents of a specific time and place. Through her sculptures and installations, Smriti Dixit connects personal and collective memories, revealing that history is not recorded by objects, but imagined through them. Her work investigates the potential of the neglected, and the lyricism of the forgotten. In this sense, Dixit collects the future ruins of our civilization, a reminder that we are only remembered by what we leave behind. In the wall installations, Dixit returns to the quilt, a form she has experimented with in various ways. Dixit activates the history of quilting, choosing materials from outside of the home, encoding it with a meaning that is beyond the domestic. The fabric hangs from the wall like a web of arteries, of bloodline and lineage, passed from one woman to another. Objects, both found and personal are interspersed in the quilt, adding physical and psychological and psychological weight, creating points of meeting and stoppages along the grid. In the 2015 edition of the Art Fair, Art Musings is presenting a site specific work from the series ‘Memory of Red’ in the special project section.
16.01.2015 – 21.02.2015
