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‘That’s All Folks!’
Raghava K K
September – October 2013

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Art Musings presents their next exhibition, That’s All Folks! with a solo exhibition featuring recent works by Raghava K K. Raghava K K is a multi-disciplinary artist. He works in genres as disparate as painting, film, installation, iPad Art, interactive art and performance. His work conceptually grapples with the construct of identity, gender and sexuality within the structures of power, knowledge, and empathy. Says Raghava K K of this current body of works, “My visual metaphors in ‘That’s All Folks’ come about through the emotional mapping of the three disparate worlds -The Cartoon, The Historical, The Memetic. By this, I mean that I will not map literal characters or events, but an emotional response to them. My intention in bringing these worlds together is to exaggerate the flatness of Indian school history using the further flattening medium of Caricature and the indoctrinatory nature of Memes. I see ‘That’s All Folks’ as my historical documents where the linearity of time has been distorted and rearranged like a big knot creating parallel and orthogonal universes.”

04.09.2013 – 25.10.2013

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‘As Within…so Without’
Ganesh Haloi & Ram Kumar
July – August 2013

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Art Musings presents ‘As Within….so Without’, an exhibition featuring paintings of Ram Kumar & Ganesh Haloi, two of India’s most accomplished abstractionists. Each artist, the former in New Delhi and the latter in Kolkata, has devoted several decades to the activation of the non-representational painted surface. Kumar and Haloi continue to renew their chosen idiom with an admirable energy of inventiveness that is matched by a magical richness of emotion. Ram Kumar’s paintings open out in sweeps of ochre, viridian and aquamarine, as he mounts his contemplations of the cosmic cycle of creation, dissolution and regeneration. A residual geography and a notational architecture creep into the grandeur of the entropic universe: stray signs of settlement and activity surface through the wreckage of a shattered world. Ganesh Haloi’s paintings encode an elegy for the loss of landscape; in their kaleidoscopic evocation of rivers and hills, marshes and lakes, they speak of the cartographies of a homeland. Haloi’s works are lyrical hymns to the natural world, its splendor recalled through detail and notation, the fragment rather than the vista.

17.07.2013 – 30.08.2013

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‘BLACK/white’
Various Artists
June – July 2013

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Art Musings opens their next exhibition BLACK/white on 3 June 2013 with a group show featuring leading artists. Paresh Maity’s landscapes of the ghats of Benaras, and the backwaters of Kerala to the canals of Venice form a suite of small works. A large canvas dominates this series depicting the gray monsoon. The imagery in Jayasri Burman’s line drawings have a dream-like lyrical quality. A large painting depicting a pantheon of Hindu gods forms the central piece for this body of works, along with a set of smaller paintings in the same theme. Laxma Goud displays early etchings, prints and watercolor works. The masterful small paintings of rural village life in a palette of monochrome grays give an interesting glimpse of village nostalgia, the surreal, and the erotic. Vaikuntam draws inspiration for his work from the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. Women are frequent subjects for his works. Raghava K K’s work conceptually grapples with the construct of identity, gender and sexuality, and the absence of interpersonal context in today’s world of online identity performance. Lalu Prasad Shaw’s still-lifes and portraits have a well-composed and smooth exterior. The artist draws inspiration from nature and the milieu surrounding the Bengali middle class. Ajay De works are easily identified by his trademark use of black, interspersed with bursts of red or blue. Images of Ganesha and Mother Teresa are recurring icons. Viveek Sharma’s paintings feature the daily grind of the middle-class Mumbaikar, where the artist figures as an integral part of the narrative – a silent observer of the event. Nandan Purkayastha’s works in black and white achieve depth and dimension. The fine spiral pattern drawing inter-relates all the elements in the painting giving it a unique complexity. The aura of science fiction surrounds Ajay Dhandre’s delightful, meticulously detailed paintings. The mechanisms and habitats that he conjures up are presented as jewel –like specimens in a museum of predictions.

03.06.2013 – 15.07.2013

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’37 Indian Still Lifes’
37 Photographers
March – April 2013

As part of the Focus Festival Mumbai, Art Musings has collaborated with Tasveer to present 37 Indian Still Lifes. 37 of the leading photographers working in India today investigate the subject of still life, and to see how this subject can be explored in a specifically Indian context. Whilst one of the central genres in the history of art, this has been an all but neglected field of enquiry in contemporary photography in India – overshadowed primarily by the social documentary of Indian photographers and the increasingly conceptualized gaze of foreign reportage in India. As such, the cultures, events and landscape of India are often documented, but the presentation of physical objects, and the narratives therein remain largely uninvestigated.

14.03.2013 – 13.04.2013

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‘Womantime’
Nalini Malani
February – March 2013

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Art Musings presents a solo exhibition of Nalini Malani (1946, Karachi), one of India’s best-known senior experimental multimedia artists; who has from the very outset, given the alternative voice a platform in her politically engaged art. The exhibition features paintings, as well as a shadow play, comprising 30 turntables and reverse, painted cylinders, as well as a single channel video work. Building up innumerable layers of fragmentary images into dreamlike and allegorical constellations, Malani’s work can be interpreted as a series of phantasmagorical tales. They are charged with critiques of violence, repression and contradiction that plague contemporary society, without becoming didactical but opening up thought provoking interpretations for the viewer.

09.02.2013 – 15.03.2013

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‘India Art Fair’
Various Artists
January – February 2013

Art Musings at the India Art Fair – Booth E- 1, in New Delhi, is showcasing 11 artists. S H Raza’s work has mystic aspects of Hindu philosophy. The ‘Bindu’ is more of an icon, sacred in its symbolism, and placing his work in an Indian context. Sakti Burman’s paintings evoke the look of a weathered fresco, using a marbling effect, achieved by blending oils with acrylics, and employing pointillism. Anjolie Ela Menon’s art incorporates diverse cultures, with traces of Byzantine traditions. Her works juxtapose the classical icon and the popular image. Nalini Malani is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses painting, projected animation and video. Baiju Parthan, an inter-media artist, works with traditional media of painting as well as digital technology based installation art. He is showcasing a suite of small paintings. Raghava K K’s work is inspired by current and past events, in which he creates his own version of history through stories and not facts. Nilofer Suleman’s paintings, with elements of Indian typography and street graphics is a coalition of styles that take Indian Graphic Culture onto a contemporary platform. Jayasri Burman weaves the design element of the folk idiom into the intricate patterns of her work, retaining the natural charm and naiveté. Maya Burman’s paintings have a tapestry like effect, the details of Indian miniature painting and French art nouveau tradition merging in her art. In Viveek Sharma’s work, social, and political topics are conveyed through metaphors. Smriti Dixit’s palette consists of textured fabrics and plastics. She embraces the processes of experimentation and creation to communicate the concepts of rebirth, recycling and renewal.

31.01.2013 – 03.02.2013

ENCHANTED (MAITE DELTEIL), 2006

‘Enchanted’
Maïté Delteil
January – February 2013

Art Musings is proud to present a solo exhibition of Maïté Delteil, (1933, Furnel, France) entitled Enchanted. This is her third solo exhibition in Mumbai with Art Musings, after the highly acclaimed Gardens of Grace, 2004 and Fruits of Grace, 2007. The exquisite images that comprise Delteil’s recent body of paintings at first glance may appear to express a preoccupation with the genres of still life and landscape; but they are more accurately readable as meditations that unfold in the borderland between memory and fantasy, wakefulness and dream. Delteil’s attentiveness to detail is a form of devotion: her paintings are songs of praise, in which she exalts the beauty of things even as they pass into decay and dissolution, as creatures of time. The exhibition will also see Art Musings releasing a coffee table book to coincide with the exhibition, which will document the artist’s works spanning her entire career, some rare photographs of the artist with her family including her husband celebrated artist Sakti Burman and daughter Maya Burman, as well as contain in-depth writing by eminent writers.

12.01.2013 – 02.02.2013

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‘Vistaar’
S H RAZA
November 2012 – January 2013

Art Musings is proud to present a solo exhibition of Padma Shree S H Raza entitled Vistaar. In the course of a career spanning nearly 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. Working with basic forms such as the point, the circle and the concentric diagram, Raza has pursued a pictorial japa as a means of approaching the deep sources of the self. His art lends itself to such a quest for intensity: the compass of its scale meets the eye in an intimate encounter; the linear stroke, the chromatic pitch and the unspoken sound explode, not at the distance set by the frame, but within our minds. In his favoured vocabulary of motifs, alongside cosmic references as the bija or seed, the bindu or focal source, the divya-chakshu or inner eye, and the kalpa vriksha or cosmic tree, the artist also dwells on the twinned nagas, the interlocking serpents emblematic of regeneration, and the yoni, the locus of the female principle.

27.11.2012 – 05.01.2013

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‘Bombay Bioscope’
NILOFER SULEMAN
October – November 2012

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Bangalore based artist, Nilofer Suleman, (1963, Indore, India) is in Love with India and with each exhibition it grows. Her next solo opens with Art Musings on 19 October 2012, entitled Bombay Bioscope. Before big screens and bollywood, there were bioscopes. Beautifully adorned and unassuming, you could peek into them and watch the real world around you disappear, revealing a painted universe. Bombay Bioscope does exactly that. Watch Mumbai as we know it dissolve into an older world where stars come to Parsi cafes, dreams are made in old studios, walk through the streets of Chor Bazaar and pick up old crumbling books at Fort; watch a movie in Palace theatre. A celebration of Bombay and all its innocence and beauty, a city that unites and goes on and on and on. Suleman is inspired by Indian typography and street graphics. Her work is a coalition of styles that weave together a host of Indian influences: animated characters, old and charming lithographs of gods and goddesses hidden away on tin boxes, hilarious misspelt words and matchbox art. Nilofer Suleman’s style juxtaposes the real world on the streets to a softer world where lotuses sprout from any surface, serpents fall asleep daintily in one’s hair, and blue-skinned lovers embrace.

19.10.2012 – 25.11.2012

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