‘Mythical Realms’, a solo exhibition by Milburn Cherian, features select paintings done over a period of the last decade. Milburn’s paintings are sumptuous in their detail, 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. Attentive to the merging of periods and styles, her paintings carry the memories of several cultures, continents and traditions.
Art Musings presents ‘Savage Flowers’, a solo exhibition of Smriti Dixit, curated by Nancy Adajania. The exhibition presents Dixit’s sculptures at a point when the artist has come powerfully into her own. It features site-specific installations and sculptures, woven, variously, from plastic tags and strings of fabric: everyday materials found, made, recycled and upcycled. Dixit’s work points to the complicated slippage between the spiritual and the commercial, the organic and the industrial, the sustainable and the unsustainable. It gestures towards the struggle for survival in which the human and non-human species are engaged, on a fragile planet that they must share.To quote exhibition curator Nancy Adajania, “These are infinite projects, constructed patiently and repetitively over a period of time and invested with endless labour. Dixit blurs the line between the organic and the industrial. Her sculptures are fecund creatures that might startlingly throw out a green shoot if you lavish them with focused attention. Even as they consolidate into archetypal and biomorphic forms that remind us of mandalas, screens, yonis or cocoons, these sculptures are an extension of the artist’s body, its stresses and strains, dreams and disquiets channeled through moments of stillness, growth, and even overgrowth.”
Art Musings presenting a special Weekend Pop-up from Thursday to Saturday, 9th – 11th Dec ’21 featuring two diverse exhibits, one with Sakti Burman, one of India’s leading artists, and the other featuring photo works by contemporary photographer Sheetal Mallar.
Art Musings is proud to present ‘Of Gods and Men’, a solo exhibition of master artist Sakti Burman, in October ’21, presenting over 100 works on display. Burman has spent the duration of the global Covid pandemic in India, unable to return to France, where he lives. Devoted to the daily practice of his art, he has produced oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, revisiting his established repertoire of imagery while responding to the stimuli of the moment. Burman’s paintings seem to exist outside the flow of time, in a world of reverie and fantasia populated by mythic beings and personae that reflect the artist’s self and his family circle. The majority of the paintings included in this exhibition have been created during this turbulent and disorienting period, during which the rhythms of the studio have offered the artist solace and a source of spiritual replenishment.
Art Musings presents ‘Neighbourhood’, the first of a series of 3 online exhibitions by contemporary photographer Sheetal Mallar. In her work, Mallar focuses on the delicate, unspoken relationships that bind people to places, and on the layers of active and latent signals by which individuals signal their identity and aspirations. ‘The Diary’ photographed across Goa, as a collaboration with good friend Savio Jon, is an ongoing project by Sheetal. In the words of Meera Ganapathi Ayappa, “Sheetal weaves a neighbourhood around spaces that are bound by familiarity. Here a feeling of solitude lives comfortably within the feeling of community. The people within these pictures inhabit carefully built worlds that are cherished because they’re fragile just like the trajectory of a relationship.”
Art Musings presents Fête Champêtre, and invite you to savour a rare delight: the paintings of two generations; a mother and a daughter, each an artist in her own distinctive right, shown together. For mother and daughter Maïté Delteil and Maya Burman, painting forms a lineage, a bloodline; and inspiration originates from the inner lives of the artists. The resultant compositions are bound to personal histories and images from the unconscious, making for paintings replete with layered realities. Living and working in France and India, both mother and daughter draw on the diverse aesthetics of these cultures. Maïté’s evocations of nature and Maya’s buoyant figures encourage an identification with the intimate dramas being performed in these paintings.
In the painterly universe of enchantments and epiphanies that Maïté conjures into being, time is calibrated through the unfolding of the seasons; through the rhythms of waking and dream; and through the transitions between interior and landscape. In Maya’s lively tableaux, time is measured out by reference to the successive stages of childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity; its rhythms play out between the childhood world of toys and the grown-up world of built and engineered objects. For both artists, time is recast as stylised narrative.
Maïté’s small oil on canvas works play with scale, as she dwells on fruits, flowers, and birds with a miniaturist’s love of jewel-like detail. Maïté’s palette is scrumptious; glowing reds, pollen-bright yellows, candied pinks, lambent blues and succulent greens. While the viewer luxuriates in the chromatic exuberance of these paintings, one is also reminded that bloom is succeeded by decay, summer by autumn: these evocations of the arboreal and the horticultural are also articulations of the vanitas, the memento mori. These paintings emerge at the cusp between landscape and still life, between nature and nature morte.
Maya’s oil on canvas paintings are animated by a joie de vivre, expressed in the pneumatic bounce of the figures, the abundance of nature, the flowers that seem to cross over from the overhanging branches of trees to the patterns on the clothes of girls at play, the choreography of figures who shuttle between the frescos of ancient cities and the streets of present-day metropolitan centres that the artist invokes. Maya approaches life through the registers of the game, the feast, and the dance. Maya portrays the protagonists of her paintings in postures of heightened play: leisure as a form of gracefully slowed down athleticism, expressing itself through a finesse of gesture in a pictorial space that appears to have been shaped as textile, as tapestry.
For the 2021 edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend, Art Musings presented Reincarnate: We meet here in the Afterlife, a solo exhibition showcasing works by contemporary artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, featuring painting, sculpture as well as a series of poetic love letters.
Shilo Shiv Suleman (born Bengaluru, 1989) is an award-winning Indian artist whose work is at the intersection of magical realism, art, technology and social justice. Her work weaves together the sensual and sacred, past and future; through paintings, wearable sculptures, interactive installations and public art interventions.
Her collaborative interactive art using brainwaves and biofeedback sensors have made her the recipient of several grants including the honorarium installation ‘Pulse & Bloom’ at Burning Man. She has been featured on TED, BBC, Rolling Stone, MSNBC, Tech Crunch, The Guardian, WIRED, and has exhibited her work at the Southbank Centre in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Doorways II is the second in the series of three exhibitions as we adjust to the new normal. Doorways II features works by various artists in different mediums and subject matter, each work opening up to lead us into the special vision of its creator, into the artist’s unique experience of the world. You can choose to come to the gallery and view the works in a designated time slot, or we can arrange for you to see them in the privacy of your homes. We would like to thank all our patrons and well-wishers as we travel through these strange times together, and a big thank you to all our artists, who continue to inspire awe and wonder.
Art Musings begins the season with a new exhibition on 10th September 2020. As we invite visitors back to our gallery after a six-month gap, we would encourage you to call ahead and make appointments, to allow us to effectively practise social distancing norms. We assure you that all safety measures are in place and our spaces are sanitised.
Doorways features works by various artists in different mediums and subject matter, each work opening up to lead us into the special vision of its creator, into the artist’s unique experience of the world. We would like to thank all our patrons and well-wishers as we travel through these strange times together, and a big thank you to all our artists, who continue to inspire awe and wonder.
Art Musings is presenting a group show featuring acclaimed artists Laxma Goud, T. Vaikuntam and Samir Mondal which opens on 11 March ‘20. The exhibition features paintings in oils, acrylic & watercolour as well as etchings and sculptures in their trademark style.
Works on display by Laxma Goud include a variety of mediums including etching, gouache, pastel, sculpture, and glass painting. Early works on display include masterful small paintings of village life in a palette of monochrome greys in pen and ink, and his drawings and etchings from this period are an interesting combination of village nostalgia, the surreal, and the erotic. Also on display are recent reverse glass paintings in a more decorative style.
Vaikuntam draws inspiration for his work from the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. Women, in particular, are frequent subjects for his works. The love for this subject can be traced back to his fascination with theatre groups that travelled to and performed in his village. His work has a distinctly raw, rustic and potent flavour.
Samir Mondal is one of India’s leading watercolour painters. His subjects include starkly vibrant portraits of women, as well as floral landscapes. The bold striking watercolours are radiant in their rendering. Mondal has incorporated the inherent quality, richness and substance of the medium of oil, and has developed textures and structural features into his watercolour works giving them vitality and depth.
