Art Musings is participating in the upcoming edition of the India Art Fair, held in Delhi, 28th April – 1st May ’22, showcasing 7 of our artists. The line-up includes Sakti Burman, Paresh Maity, Baiju Parthan, Maya Burman, Nilofer Suleman, Milburn Cherian & Shilo Shiv Suleman.
Works by Indian master artist Sakti Burman featuring at the fair are miniature watercolors of the Harlequin, a recurrent figure in the artist’s body of works. The Harlequin is a multi-purpose alter ego, a version of Burman’s multi-faceted self-portraiture: the artist as one who is both participant and witness, actor and observer in his own dramas of creation, communication and being.
Leading contemporary artist Paresh Maity is exhibiting a monumental diptych. The work on display ‘Infinity Games’, takes us into the spectacular setting in Benares during the festival of Dev Deepavali, where the waters are filled with diyas and the skies light up with hot-air balloons.
Multi-media artist Baiju Parthan is presenting immersive, multi-layered experiential dreamscapes. Parthan’s paintings reflect the artist’s long standing interest in ethnobotany, and psychedelic plants that generate psychotropic substances. The poppy flower with its perception shifting potential is used as a metaphor marking a threshold, and an entry point into domain of the metaphysical.
France based artist Maya Burman’s tondo watercolours are peopled by pneumatic figures, depicted in moments of play and festivity expressive of an abundant joie de vivre. Maya’s characters live in mythology and metaphor. Maya creates a dreamlike fairyland in her paintings, merging details of Indian miniature painting and European Middle Age architecture in her art.
Master storyteller Nilofer Suleman fills her canvas with kaleidoscopic imagery. Suleman, who devoted herself to cartography for many years, now maps terrains that are shaped by memory, fabular narrative, embroidered travellers’ tales and sensory excitements. Her protagonists seem to have stepped out of miniature paintings, sometimes displaying the elongated eyes of Jaina manuscript illuminations, and at other times equipped with the almond eyes prized in Mughal painting.
The mythical realms of Milburn Cherian’s paintings are sumptuous in their detail and populated by a large number of figures, charged with the energy of collective participation in a ritual or a sacred mystery. While her paintings build into a phantasmagoria, she structures her works meticulously, holding all the events in her frames together within subtle and shifting grids of perspective. Her paintings carry the memories of several cultures, continents and traditions.
After a deep immersion with the Nile, comparing Indian and Egyptian cosmologies and civilizations, multi-media artist Shilo Shiv Suleman attempts to treat our rivers as sacred once again. In a contemporary video piece, inspired by river myths, Shilo dons a wearable sculpture and forms a procession, ‘Rebirthing the River’. Depictions of divine rivers are decoded – sensual and sacred, wide-hipped and worthy of worship. In her paintings, she fuses self-portraiture with the iconography of once-and-future goddesses, guardians of the earth, presiding over an exuberance that is both literal and figurative.