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Art Musings presented a solo exhibition of Kerala based artist Gopikrishna after a hiatus 9 years. The exhibition entitled Anything Can Happen featured paintings in oil and watercolour, done over the last decade. Presenting an immense body of works, the show was divided into 2 chapters, Chapter I, In the Land of the Never-ending Story, from 15 September – 14 October ‘22 and Chapter II, The Everlasting Spell of Mutiny from 20 October – 26 November ‘22.

A consummate storyteller, Gopikrishna peoples his universe with myriad creatures and characters, each conveying their own subtle wisdom.  In his surrealistic artworks, one can witness the ordinary and the impossible, unity and solitude, illumination and darkness. To enter the pictorial world of Gopikrishna is to be plunged into a pageant of extraordinarily animated fables. Gopikrishna’s vocabulary draws on a multitude of sources – on the occult manuscript, the folktale, the Tamil theatre backdrop, and the Kerala temple painting tradition.

Ranjit Hoskote, the curatorial advisor to this exhibition, wrote: “Gopikrishna is a painter of rare visionary power. His works evoke brilliant, phantasmagoric fictions in which hybrids of human, animal and machine inhabit radically disturbing scenarios of social transformation, political turmoil, and cultural conflict. Gopikrishna takes up the perennial themes of the epics – war, love, duty, loss, and quest – and transposes them to futuristic landscapes that are, at the same time, allegories of our troubled present. We come upon chimeras of various kinds here: traffic policemen who direct fates rather than vehicles, robotic guards, assassins, brigands, and interrogators. A number of the paintings assume the form of hallucinatory choreographies of warfare. A recurrent motif in Gopikrishna’s art is the infernal machine, the contraption, the embodiment of a larger-than-human consciousness that is committed to control, torture, surveillance, and war. And yet, set against this unsettling menace, there is also a profound tenderness in Gopikrishna’s work. Witness, for instance, the human figures who cling to the branches of a frangipani tree, asleep. Or the owls who transfix us with their quizzical stares, guardians of occult knowledge. Everywhere, in these paintings, we find the impulse to connect across disjunction: humans reach out to animals, plants to animals, machines to other machines. At the core of Gopikrishna’s art is the belief that the world is generated by twin natures that have been set asunder by historical circumstances, and must be brought together again: the animal and the angelic, the civil and the military, the civic and the feral.”

(Extract from catalogue essay by Ranjit Hoskote)

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Art Musings is honoured to be a collaborator on ‘Zamin: Homelands’, an exhibition of works by S H Raza, at the JNAF Gallery, CSMVS Museum. This is a momentous year, in which Raza’s centenary coincides with the Museum’s 100th year. The exhibition is presented through a multi-partnership between the CSMVS Museum, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Art Musings and the Raza Foundation.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by Raza’s seminal work ‘Zamin’, created in 1971. The exhibition explores the artist’s landscapes through a conception of place, territory, borders and belonging. In ‘Zamin: Homelands’, we feature paintings from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection and other collections in the city alongside archival material sourced from the Raza Foundation.

To quote exhibition curator Puja Vaish, “‘Zamin: Homelands’ traces Raza’s oeuvre as a landscape artist, a diaspora artist and as an artist in pursuit of an Indian modern sensibility. In Raza’s artworks we see these paradigms merge through a recourse to abstraction. The exhibition hinges on the period between the 60s – 70s, when Raza moved from painting street scenes to an abstraction of nature, which originated through a desire to connect with the Indian forest landscape. From this defining juncture, we look back at some of the early cityscapes of Bombay, the French landscapes and the later ‘Bindu’ works of the 80s which he became most known for.

Among the first Indian diaspora artists, Raza encapsulated in his work the profound experience of expressing one’s identity through the eyes of the other within a global context. The external to inward gaze, meshed ideas of the native and the foreign, the East and the West. The quest for rootedness in one’s origins is observed in many of the artists who moved to the West. For Raza, this meant a deep study of Indian aesthetics, spiritual scriptures and revisiting his childhood- to rekindle a sense of wonder and meaning to nature and the environment. The exhibition showcases Raza’s experiments with European and Indian painterly traditions to arrive at a unique form of abstraction. Raza’s painting titles, letters exchanges and diary notes written in French, English and Devanagari, reveal his varied knowledge of art, literature, poetry and philosophy of world cultures.”

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Art Musings is participating in the upcoming edition of the India Art Fair, held in Delhi, 28^th April – 1^st 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.

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‘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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.