Art Musings ends the year-long celebration of the 20th anniversary of its founding of the gallery with the fifth and concluding exhibition, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, which opens on 5 November ’19, showcasing four artists: Anjolie Ela Menon, Jayasri Burman, Milburn Cherian, and Sakti Burman.
The artists in this exhibition create enigmatic domains of persona, gesture, milieu and symbology, inflected with allegory yet alert to the nuances of the everyday and familiar. Anjolie Ela Menon’s protagonists could be Renaissance Madonnas or prophets from unnamed topographies, or neighbourhood characters weaving the textures of quotidian life. Jayasri Burman’s paintings are hymns to the organic interrelatedness of life, articulated through the aquatic and terrestrial creatures, and the mythic amphibians that populate her frames. Milburn Cherian is inspired by the paintings of Brueghel, which, while being densely packed with figures, pivot on minute details. Sakti Burman produces choreographies in which gods, naiads, fauns and nymphs join together with humans, often the artist himself, and his family, lightly disguised.