Nandan Purkayastha’s second solo exhibition Endgame, opens on 22 April at Art Musings. Nandan Purkayashtha’s monochrome drawings are full of detail and dimension, with the fine black and white spiral pattern giving them a unique complexity. The artist uses pen and ink to create expansive spaces rich in mythological and historical references. Patterns are deftly overlaid, giving the drawings the tactility and texture of fabric. Distortions of space and time come together to tell complex stories, and Purkayashtha’s fantastical landscapes play with movement and illusion, as in a monumental vision of the Taj Mahal, rippling as though it is reflected in a pool of water. Figures navigate through winding picture planes, woven into the stark contrast of black and white. They emerge half-formed, indistinct from a twisting staircase or swirling cloud, animating the inanimate. Bodies and shadows make up a narrative that is sexually deviant, subverting the naïve veneer often associated with fairy tales. Pieces are immobile in an elaborate game of chess, waiting at the brink of action.

22.04.2014 – 31.05.2014

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Art Musings is presenting a solo exhibition of one of India’s most prominent sculptors K S Radhakrishnan entitled terrafly. The exhibition features a series of his new sculptures, where he represents his desire to engage with his sculptural protagonist Musui’s conscience and the fluidity of Musui’s self. The title sculpture Terrafly is replete with nuanced meanings. Musui, an air bound presence at the top of a vertical column surveys all that is going on around the column. He is at once the state and the presence of a soul. The sculptor brings in a double metaphor here; one critical and the other benevolent. While making Musui an agent of intrusive gaze, Radhakrishnan counterbalances it with the benevolent presence. The other sculptures depict Maiya as a physical manifestation of Musui’s conscience placed on Musui’s head. Through these works Radhakrishnan makes a statement about the mysterious existence of the human conscience and its burdening effect on the actions of human beings. Radhakrishnan reaffirms the inseparability of Musui and Maiya – the male and the female.

20.03.2014 – 15.04.2014

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Art Musings, in collaboration with Natesan’s Antiqarts is presenting Itihaas, an exhibition of rare sculptures, being displayed for the first time in Mumbai. Itihaas takes you on a journey through India’s glorious past, from 1500 BC to 2000 CE, cutting across various geographies, dynasties and medium to give the art lover a view of ancient Indian art in a capsule. On display in the exhibition is a bouquet of objects ranging from 1500 BC to 1930 CE covering dynasties as diverse as Chola, Hoysala, Chera, Rashtrakuta and others. From an ancient harpoon to Chola sculptures to Mysore paintings, the display opens new vistas in to the lesser explored area of Indian antiquities. It is curated to give the curious art lover a clearer vision of India’s glorious past.

28.02.2014 – 15.03.2014

For the India Art Fair 2014, Art Musings is showcasing the works of six artists; S H Raza, Baiju Parthan, Smriti Dixit, Raghava K K, Nilofer Suleman and Ajay Dhandre. Padma Vibhushan awardee, S H Raza is one of the most prominent artists living today. He has shaped the face of Modernism in India with his unique vision and style. Raza’s work has formalism as well as mystic aspects of Hindu philosophy. His geometrical painting with the iconic circle or ‘Bindu’, sacred in its symbolism, places his work in an Indian context. Baiju Parthan is an inter-media artist, working with painting and digital technology based installation art. On display are his works in the digital realm consisting of explorations into the constantly mutating interstice where the virtual and real bleed into each other. Through a range of computer generated virtual objects presented in lenticular prints, Parthan manages to present a critique on high technology and its impact on our life and experience of reality. Nilofer’s painting is a witty and colorful illustration of India, offering vibrant vantage points and comical observations about the city. The characters which animate her canvases produce a signature effect with their elongated almond eyes and stylized features. Pictures, posters and icons within the works spill into a painted space that is inhabited by Suleman’s quirky and idiosyncratic figures. Raghava K K is a multidisciplinary artist, working in disparate genres. In his work, iconic cartoons and popular memes are placed beside prominent figures in a space where each character transcends its usual association and takes on new identities. Raghava approaches his paintings as his own personal historical documents, where the linearity of time has been distorted and rearranged creating parallel and orthogonal universes. Smriti Dixit’s art is an indelibly feminine procedure, finding its foundations in the process of its creation as much as in its final form. However, Dixit’s art cannot be dissected into a celebration of femininity. Instead, it acts an antidote to a reified archetype of the feminine experience. Her palette consists of variously textured fabrics and plastics. The aura of science fiction surrounds Ajay Dhandre’s meticulously detailed paintings. His frames are populated by mechanical-organic composite forms: cyborgs, robots, prosthetic devices that extend the reach of body as well as consciousness and interstellar probes. Dhandre’s interest in hybrids and devices is significant. It articulates his understanding of the future as an outcome of crossovers, genetic experiments, laboratory side effects and the confluences of diverse impulses.

30.01.2014 – 02.02.2014

Smriti Dixit
Dialogue, Mixed Media
H 77'' x W 40'' x D 34''

S H Raza
Tum
Acrylic On Canvas
150 X 150 Cms

Raghava K K
Venus 3.0
Acrylic on Canvas
60'' x 84''

Nilofer Suleman
Astro Vishnu
Acrylic on Canvas
49'' X 85''

Baiju Parthan
Deposition & Testimony- B
3d Rendering
Animated Lenticular Print
36” x 30”

Baiju Parthan
Deposition & Testimony- A
3d Rendering
Animated Lenticular Print
36” x 30”

Baiju Parthan
Deposition & Testimony- C
3d Rendering
Animated Lenticular Print
36” x 30”

Ajay Dhandre
Cyborg Interface Device - C26
Watercolour on Paper
84" X 60"

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Art Musings is presenting a solo exhibition of one of India’s most prominent artists Paresh Maity entitled Symphony of Silence. His last solo exhibition in Mumbai, Montage: Moments, Memories was with Art Musings in 2009. The exhibition brings together works in diverse mediums, including painting, sculpture and video. This new body of works sees the artist approach his subjects with new expression. There is a modernity of forms and shapes. The colors are vibrant, and echo the passion of the artist. The focus is on the figure, specifically the faces, with their myriad expressions, closely cropped and juxtaposed with their surroundings. Maity’s sculptural works are typical of his style – dynamic, strong and arresting. The bold lines, the piercing gaze and the painting over the sculptures give them a unique identity. Says Maity, “The most important inspiration in my work is nature. Sitting on the banks of the river, watching the reflections of the sky in the water, looking at the moods of the moving water and watching the boats…these images haunted me long after I left my home in Tamluk. I began scribbling at the age of eight, the boat was the first image I drew and this is where my journey began. My journeys through the sand dunes of Rajasthan, the backwaters of Kerala, the canals of Venice, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, have all been captured in my works. As an artist, I observe, perceive and imagine forms, which I then express in my art.”

10.12.2013 – 15.01.2014

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Art Musings proudly presents a solo exhibition of Kerala based artist Gopikrishna featuring paintings in oil and watercolour. A consummate storyteller, Gopikrishna peoples his universe with myriad creatures and characters, each conveying their own subtle wisdom. His paintings appear as though they were pages from a book of fairytales. In his surrealistic canvas, one can witness the ordinary and the impossible, unity and solitude, illumination and darkness. About the works, says Gopikrishna, “This body of paintings, executed from 2011-13, represent what has been glimpsed, experienced, memorized and realized through this period. Life, as always, has been a traverse through pinnacles and ravines. Paintings thus born bear evidence of the secretive existences perceived from the precipices of life. They reveal a state of timelessness as unaffected by the bangs of the time-bound. They seek out the spiritual fibres deeply hidden in the structure of life -forms.”28.10.2013 – 05.12.2013

28.10.2013 – 05.12.2013

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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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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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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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Quarto ’13 – featuring 4 prominent artists, A Ramachandran, K G Subramanyan, Anjolie Ela Menon and Satish Gujral.

20.04.2013 – 31.05.2013