Art Musings participated in the 2020 edition of the India Art Fair, held in Delhi. The booth # C 07 featured works by Baiju Parthan, Smriti Dixit, Raghava K K and Shilo Shiv Suleman.

Baiju Parthan is a pioneer of new media art in India, his hybrid works combining online and offline technologies. Parthan presented ‘Yesterday’s Monument – City of Dreams’, an animated 3D lenticular print, drawing us into the cycles of boom and slump, aspiration and disappointment, innovation and obsolescence that define metropolitan Indian life. Also on view were The ‘Wheel of Fortune’ series which borrow the symbolism of the tenth card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot which intimates the arrival of unexpected changes in the present and immediate future.

Raghava K K is a multidisciplinary artist including painting, installation and performance. ‘The Impossible Bouquet’ series is inspired by the Dutch tradition of still life where flowers are collected from different seasons to create an impossible bouquet. The artist draws parallels between this and the condition of being Indian – an impossible democracy. A space where seemingly conflicting entities like cartoons, memes, historical characters coexist, creating a harmonious impossible sense of beauty.

Shilo Shiv Suleman is an artist whose work is sustained by commitments to poetry, technology and social justice. In this series of paintings and wearable sculptures, Shilo imagines a safe and sacred space for women far above the earth. She begs the mythical creature – ‘Buraq, take me with you’. Buraq, in Islamic tradition, was said to be the vehicle of the prophet to the seventh heavens. In these works, the women begin to evolve to grow wings to fly into another place far away from here.

Smriti Dixit has long been committed to processes of recycling in her art, incorporating fabric, found objects, plastic price tags and other elements of the detritus of everyday life into her art-works. Dixit presents ‘Seri’ a trilogy of works, each achieved through a process of meditative slowing down – in defiance of the current obsession with speed. ‘Silkworm’ consists of cocoons made from plastic price tags, suggesting the gestation that produces a fine fabric. Using the knitting process, price tags are once again the raw material for ‘Ripening’, a homage to the Lodoicea, a precious tree that flowers only after it has reached 100 years. ‘Red Pupa’ is the product of intensive stitching, and is a hymn to the cocoon.

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For the edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2020, Art Musings presented ‘Transients’, a photography exhibition showcasing works by contemporary Indian photographer Sheetal Mallar, curated by Ranjit Hoskote. In her work, Mallar has focused 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. She has developed an extended portraiture of various urban subcultures and professional groups, exploring the tension between the individual personality and the collective context. Several of her ongoing projects engage with the culture, topography and narratives of popular Indian cinema.

Art Musings ends the year-long celebration of the 20th anniversary of its founding of the gallery with the fifth and concluding exhibition, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, which opens on 5 November ’19, showcasing four artists: Anjolie Ela Menon, Jayasri Burman, Milburn Cherian, and Sakti Burman.

The artists in this exhibition create enigmatic domains of persona, gesture, milieu and symbology, inflected with allegory yet alert to the nuances of the everyday and familiar. Anjolie Ela Menon’s protagonists could be Renaissance Madonnas or prophets from unnamed topographies, or neighbourhood characters weaving the textures of quotidian life. Jayasri Burman’s paintings are hymns to the organic interrelatedness of life, articulated through the aquatic and terrestrial creatures, and the mythic amphibians that populate her frames. Milburn Cherian is inspired by the paintings of Brueghel, which, while being densely packed with figures, pivot on minute details. Sakti Burman produces choreographies in which gods, naiads, fauns and nymphs join together with humans, often the artist himself, and his family, lightly disguised.

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Art Musings carries the year-long five-show sequence celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding into the gallery’s own space, continuing the celebration that began with The Opening Plenary, a show that presented works, all created especially for the occasion, by 20 artists whose careers the gallery has nurtured, whose experiments it has sustained, and with whom it has had close, mutually cherished associations.

The fourth exhibition in this cycle, Pilgrims in Space, Time, Identity, started today 6 September ’19, showcasing four artists: Maya Burman, Nalini Malani, Raghava K K, and Shilo Shiv Suleman. The title of this exhibition refers to their journeys of experimentation, exploration and discovery

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With this exhibition, Art Musings Art Musings carries the year-long five-show sequence celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding into the gallery’s own space, continuing the celebration that began with The Opening Plenary, a show that presented works, all created especially for the occasion, by 20 artists whose careers the gallery has nurtured, whose experiments it has sustained, and with whom it has had close, mutually cherished associations.

The third exhibition in this cycle, Threads into the Labyrinth, opens on 2 July ‘19, showcasing works of Atul Dodiya, Paresh Maity, Prabhakar Kolte, and Rameshwar Broota. Despite their radically different approaches, these artists share a fascination with the shifting border between image and non-image, between human knowledge and its transcendence. Atul Dodiya has evolved a distinctive archive of references to art history, world cinema, and the Gandhian movement. Through it, he celebrates love, melancholia, the desire for encyclopaedic knowledge, and the challenge of what lies beyond knowing. Paresh Maity re-calibrates the portrait and the landscape, the individual and the group, through his polychrome yet shadowed festivity. Turning to installation, he invites the viewer into a mysterious interplay of visual, aural and subliminal sensations. Prabhakar Kolte has long worshipped at the altar of abstraction, abjuring recognisable objects and the parameters of retinal reality in favour of the purity of colour, brushstroke and the image that refuses the name of image. Rameshwar Broota has, in recent decades, committed himself to the demanding image that must be scraped into existence from beneath layers of pigment: the image that partakes of sensual physicality yet remains spectral, beyond name and style.

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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.