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With this exhibition, Art Musings carries the year-long five-show sequence celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding into the gallery’s own space. The celebration began at the Jehangir Art Gallery in February ‘19 with The Opening Plenary, a show that presented works, all created especially for the occasion, by 20 artists. Across 2019, a sequence of five shows, each comprising works by four of these 20 artists, will open at Art Musings.

The first of the five exhibitions The Castle of Crossed Destinies opened on 5 March ’19 featuring four artists whose individually distinctive oeuvres intersect at key points. All of them are devoted to a consideration of the unpredictable convergence of past and future. All are held in rapture by the simultaneity of fossil, trace, engine and dream. All, in different ways, reflect pensively on what it means to be human as well as animal or machine, to belong to several species or categories of being at the same time. These concerns have animated the practices of Ajay Dhandre, Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, and Nandan Purkayastha, across generations, geographical locations, pedagogical trajectories and journeys of exploration, and choices of the medium.

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With this exhibition, Art Musings carries the year-long five-show sequence celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding into the gallery’s own space. The celebration began at the Jehangir Art Gallery in February ‘19 with The Opening Plenary, a show that presented works, all created especially for the occasion, by 20 artists. Across 2019, a sequence of five shows, each comprising works by four of these 20 artists, will open at Art Musings.

The first of the five exhibitions The Castle of Crossed Destinies opens on 5 March ’19 featuring four artists whose individually distinctive oeuvres intersect at key points. All of them are devoted to a consideration of the unpredictable convergence of past and future. All are held in rapture by the simultaneity of fossil, trace, engine and dream. All, in different ways, reflect pensively on what it means to be human as well as animal or machine, to belong to several species or categories of being at the same time. These concerns have animated the practices of Ajay Dhandre, Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, and Nandan Purkayastha, across generations, geographical locations, pedagogical trajectories and journeys of exploration, and choices of medium.

Ajay Dhandre is a time-traveller, shuttling between an evocation of rediscovered pasts and imagined futures. In his works, such as ‘The Found and the Made’ and ‘Back to the Future 1 and 2’, he combines natural and human-made objects into a record of the interaction between a species and its habitat. In his art, he has often brought together fossils and relics suggesting geological deep time, as well as composite forms signalling epochs to come, such as cyborgs, robots, prosthetic devices and interstellar probes.

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This year, 2019, marks the 20^th anniversary of the founding of Gallery Art Musings, one of the earliest galleries to have been established in South Mumbai’s vibrant, culturally rich Colaba area. We will celebrate this occasion through a year-long cycle of exhibitions, collectively titled, quite simply, The 20^th, curated by Ranjit Hoskote. The first event of this cycle will be ‘The Opening Plenary’, an exhibition showing works by 20 artists, which will be held at the . This will be followed by five periodic exhibitions over the rest of the year, each one featuring four of the participating artists, which will unfold across 2019 at Gallery Art Musings. Each of the shows will present a distinctive sub-group of artists from within the plenary, mapped according to core affinities, shared histories, and conceptual or stylistic connections. Twenty participating artists include: Ajay Dhandre, Anjolie Ela Menon, Atul Dodiya, Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Gopikrishna, Jayasri Burman, Maïté Delteil,Maya Burman, Milburn Cherian, Nalini Malani, Nandan Purkayastha, Nilofer Suleman, Paresh Maity, Prabhakar Kolte, Raghava K K, Rameshwar Broota, Sakti Burman, Shilo Shiv Suleman, and Smriti Dixit.

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For the upcoming edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend ’19, Art Musings presents Shadows of Water, Steps of Light, an exhibition that brings together three artists from varied disciplines: Yashwant Pitkar, architect and photographer; Smriti Dixit, painter and installation-maker; and Ranjit Hoskote, poet and essayist.

At the centre of their three-way dialogue are two glorious 11^th-century architectural structures, which were once in social use and are today archaeological monuments: the Rani-ki-vav or Queen’s Stepwell at Patan, and the Sun Temple of Modhera, both in Gujarat. The Queen’s Stepwell is an extraordinary structure: in the centuries during which it was active, it served at once as a monumental reservoir in a parched landscape, a richly ornamented temple, and a social space for the community to congregate. The Sun Temple is an architectural celebration of the convergence of solar and terrestrial energies: the dance of sun and water as articulated, especially, in the kund or temple pond, with its ensemble of double stairways forming a system of visual echoes on all sides.

Pitkar and Hoskote have visited both sites, at different times. Dixit reaches out to these places through her imagination. This exhibition has been developed around Pitkar’s subtle, accomplished suite of black-and-white photographs of these two sites – which prompts responses in the shape of a sequence of poems for Hoskote, and a series of works that straddle painting, sculpture and textile work for Dixit. As sahridayas – a Sanskrit term for aesthete, literally meaning “those who share the same heart” – these three artists explore a scintillating history of forms that takes them to the deep sources of an ecologically significant cultural practice.

Gallery Talkthrough – 19 January 2019 at 11.00 am

For the talkthrough, the participating artists will lead viewers on a talkthrough around the exhibition, its contents and contexts. Pitkar will discuss the relationship between architecture, photography and abstraction; Hoskote about his fascination with India’s water cosmology; and Dixit about the dialogue between myth and materiality in her work.

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Art Musings opens its next exhibition featuring rare graphite drawings from the 70s by esteemed French artist Maïté Delteil. Delteil’s attentiveness to detail is a form of devotion: her drawings are songs of praise, in which she exalts the beauty of things even as they pass into decay and dissolution, as creatures of time. She brings together nature and artifice, creating a sense of balance and restraint which marks her drawings. In Maite’s work, keenly-rendered birds congregate about round trees of fruits and flowers. This is a world where plant and birdlife are put in focus, and where the supplementary takes center stage. Delteil’s delicate, highly detailed drawings convey into being the roundedness of cherries, the heavy pile of snow, the variegation of the plumage of hoopoes and finches, the particular serration and generic density of foliage. Also on display is a rare suite of drawings which the artist had executed for a book ‘Louis XIII enfant’ by Michele Lochak that was published by Magnard in France in the early 80s.

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Art Musings has presented an exhibition of rare lithographs of Paris based artist Sakti Burman. Burman’s artistic oeuvre has embraced diverse practices, apart from the marbled and tapestried paintings for which he is celebrated in the art world. Over six decades, Burman has stretched himself, both imaginatively and technically, through drawing, lithography, engraving, book illustration, textile design, and sculpture.

Burman’s printmaking has played a consistent role in his studio practice. Of all the idioms of printmaking, it is lithography that most closely approximates the pleasures of painting, with its smooth stone and formative conflict of oil and ink, its drawing rendered in oil or wax, its roller-smearing of ink, and its play of tonalities. Burman’s work as a printmaker is to be measured in terms of its captivating intensity. To trace the web of relationships that connect Burman’s paintings with his drawings, watercolours and lithographs are to re-trace the artist’s process of investigation and discovery.

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Art Musings is presenting a solo exhibition The Song of Small Things, featuring one of India’s most prominent sculptors KS Radhakrishnan at Jehangir Art Gallery. Radhakrishnan is recognized as one of the most significant figures of contemporary Indian art. The bronze works featured in this exhibition do not abandon themselves to any particular mind-set and yet they are mindful, like breathing subconsciously in peopled space. The characters of the compositions are undefined but nimble in their human movement and strung together in their common spirit of joy. Stemming from bases made of things that were used everyday a long time ago, these sculptures grow like feelings, touching off sentiments that we all want to re-visit. Each twist, each bend, and each formation is a story in itself, abounding in sheer exuberance. The creator did not have a blueprint for these works. He shaped them with the blues of childhood that kept invading his senses every time he set out to build on memories. The child in him has truly shown the way. One thing is evident from his works – childhood has no history because childhood itself is part of every human’s history.

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Art Musings is presenting a group exhibition featuring acclaimed artists Anjolie Ela Menon, Jayasri Burman and Maya Burman. Anjolie Ela Menon’s works are from her Divine Mother series. Through the mastery of her technique, Menon creates images that come alive but continue to exist in an existential time-warp.  Menon’s paintings capture all the nuances and magic of motherhood. Menon’s protagonists are mythological figures as well as the ordinary people whom she portrays in her unique style. Her work is well known for the translucent textures which she creates by using thin glazes on Masonite.  Jayasri Burman’s art, derived from the rich tradition of Hindu mythology, has carved out its own identity. The imagery in Jayasri Burman’s work has a dream-like and lyrical quality. Inspired by Indian folk element, the works have a unique sensitivity. Her deep-rooted understanding of Indian mythology, Bengali culture and tradition does not escape her artworks. In her paintings one sees the careful repetition of the surface, unwavering and exquisite, with layers of cross-hatching darkening her skies and the textures of fabrics adorning her characters. Maya Burman’s series of circular watercolour paintings are peopled, made up of characters that live in mythology and metaphor. Her figures float through fields, their bodies curving with the shapes of the landscape. Patterns weave and float around the central forms evoking a sense of exuberance and joie de vivre.  Maya creates a dreamlike fairyland in her paintings. The striking thing about Maya’s paintings is the amount of detail in them. Burman’s paintings have a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to floral, decorative patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition.

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Art Musings presents Ray Trace, a solo exhibition of Baiju Parthan, showcasing a range of the artist’s lenticular works. He is one of the early exponents of new media art and mediatic-realism in the Indian contemporary art scene. The works on display are a combination of 3D graphics and lenticular printing technology. The process involves sculpting and modelling in three-dimensional virtual space using 3D software tools and presenting the result as stereoscopic prints that evoke the illusion of three-dimensional space and movement. Parthan’s vocabulary consists of arcane symbols, found imagery, as well as contemporary photographic and computer-generated imagery that are woven together to create artworks which reveal a dense multi-layered phenomenological landscape. Works on display include Parthan’s iconic series including Monument (2011) and Terminus (2017). These works belong to a series of new media works that re-imagine historic landmarks and the cityscape of Mumbai, by staging a virtual event that would impact and alter the viewer’s memory and recollection of the actual landmark, suggesting how the virtual could affect and alter the real.

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Art Musings presents Sublime Machines, a solo exhibition by Raghava K K. In his artwork and his invented media, Raghava figures the notions of transcendence and sublimity for our time and its future. In this latest series of artworks, Sublime Machines, 2018, he imagines scientific reality as a source of the sublime, reinvesting the sphere of science with emotion and human intent. Raghava was inducted into the National Geographic Society in 2013 as an Explorer for pushing the boundaries of scientific exploration through art. Artistic creativity for him is a deeply decentered enterprise shared with the users of the artwork, which is evident in his numerous collaborations with other artists, technologists, corporations, educationists, scientists, academia, etc. His lectures, including 4 TED talks, are known for inspiring his audiences to expand their social and psychologically settled selves using art.