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Art Musings opens their next exhibition on 10^th December ’24 with ‘Songs of Rebirth’, a solo show of Nikhil Chaganlal. Chaganlal is showing after a hiatus of 10 years, and this new body of paintings has emerged after his shift to Goa.

To quote from the catalogue essay by art historian and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote:

“Rendered in vivid acrylic on board, Nikhil Chaganlal’s recent paintings are animated by a deep and complex affection for Goa, a feeling that combines penumbral melancholia with resurgent joy. These paintings embody the artist’s profound and decisive shift away from Bombay and Alibaug, where he has spent much of his life, and his reorientation of purpose in Goa, where he has found emotional repose and artistic renewal. Through these pictorial songs of rebirth, Chaganlal processes the implications of this shift in intuitive ways, savouring the freedom offered by his new and nurturing environment while taking account of the dissonances he has left behind.

One can see a passionate regard for Goa’s architecture in its life-affirming diversity, a love of Goa’s unique placeness as articulated through its shapes and structures of habitation and settlement, congregation and worship. Chaganlal testifies to the vitality of Goa’s temples, churches, cathedrals, wayside chapels and guardian deity shrines, not asserted against nature but cradled within its luxuriance of forests, shrubbery, groves and wetlands. Technically, his palette is incandescent with reds, yellows, blues, greens, and oranges. But each of these colours is inflected with shadow. A luminous darkness forms the matrix of these paintings. Resonant songs of rebirth, they gain in depth and gravity by acting as elegies for the former selves that have now been sloughed off and interred in the past.”

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Sakti Burman draws from many sources; Greek and Hindu mythology, Biblical narratives and mediaeval European passion plays, puppet theatre, scroll painting, the Mughal and Rajput miniature ateliers, Kalighat and Bengali popular culture. In the painting and bas-relief on display, Sakti plays with a version of a recurrent subject of his grandson in Ganapathy playing the flute, surrounded by figures culled from his fecund interior universe: a peacock, a flying figure, a figure on a swing.

The painting ‘Utopia’ of Maïté Delteil explores the borderland between memory and fantasy, wakefulness and dream. Her brush conveys 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. Delteil’s attentiveness to detail is a form of devotion: her paintings are songs of praise.

Anjolie Ela Menon structures her painting around figures who seem to travel to us from distant milieux: sages, nymphs, saints, nomads. The luminosity of her portraits comes from the patina of diaphanous layers that have glided over the surface. This luminosity is seen in her current painting Pastoral, where Anjolie paints the mother and child from her goatherd series. These are based on people she has seen from her studio in a basti of Nizamuddin, a locality known for its famous shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin and Amir Khusrau.

Jayasri Burman has evolved an iconography that is saturated in the aura of Nature’s nurturing, sustaining, maternal capacities. She invests these capacities in the archetypal figure of the Great Mother, manifested as the Devi, symbolically associated with fertility and plenitude. This is predominant in her recent work on display Padmaja. There is an altar-like quality, depicting Nature as divinity. The imagery in her work has a dream-like and lyrical quality with a unique sensitivity.

Baiju Parthan is an inter-media artist, who shapes his vocabulary from symbols drawn from iconography and alchemy. Scope is about the zone where reasoning has ascended to its utmost to leap into an epiphany. The painting is an adaptation of M.C. Escher’s Penrose steps. Here the artist is presenting the infinite staircase as an object existing in a state of quantum superposition. Bloom is also a reference to the ethno-botanical data that reveals the pivotal role of plant-based entheogens and psychotropic alkaloids in the evolution and development of human cultural and religious realities.

Nilofer Suleman approaches her paintings in the spirit of a storyteller who enjoys nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within framed narratives and larger, circulating cycles of tales. Her protagonists seem to have stepped out of one genre of miniature painting or another. Enter the magical world of Bagh e Wasl, a lover’s garden. There is a kaleidoscopic relay of imagery. In Suleman’s realm of exquisite illusions, jharokhas and chandeliers open onto vistas, and the elements of her architecture are liable to grow wings.                 

Maya Burman two works on display are peopled by pneumatic figures, depicted in moments of play, and festivity, expressive of an abundant joie de vivre or lila, the cosmic spirit of play and creativity. Maya’s characters live in mythology and metaphor. Her figures float through fields, their bodies curving with the shapes of the landscape. The detailing lends a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to floral, decorative patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition.

Nikhil Chaganlal’s recent paintings are animated by a deep and complex affection for Goa, a feeling that combines penumbral melancholia with resurgent joy. A passionate regard for Goa’s architecture in its life-affirming diversity, a love of Goa’s unique placeness as articulated through its shapes and structures of habitation and settlement, congregation and worship is present in the works. Chaganlal testifies to the vitality of Goa’s temples, churches, cathedrals, wayside chapels and guardian deity shrines, not asserted against nature but cradled within its luxuriance of forests, shrubbery, groves and wetlands.

Smriti Dixit has long been committed to processes of recycling in her art, incorporating fabric, found objects and plastic tags into her works. In the work on display, Kaali, Smriti is influenced by the changes in the landscape brought about by the creepers and moss that grow after a rainfall. This is the creation of a temporary existence of said creepers, destroying the pre-existence of the Mango, Banyan and Sacred Fig trees. It is a reminder of the feminine energy of Kaali who destroys and provides salvation at the same time, is this the blue of Kaali or of Shiva? Of the body or of the rudraksha? Almost as if blue has been washed by blue to get to Kaali. What if one is neither wholly Shiva nor wholly Kaali?

To enter the pictorial world of Gopikrishna is to be plunged into a pageant of extraordinarily animated fables peopled by monsters, chimaeras, sages, pilgrims, warriors and actors. Travel Sketches from the Mountains, a series of three drawings, dwell on the theme of vision beyond the senses. The figures in them have no eyes but they experience the world through their inner eyes. The terrain they exist is suggestive of loneliness. In a rocky country where pleasures of the civilization are absent, the artist is travelling through. And the sketches are the narration of what he experiences in that trip.

Sheetal Mallar is a contemporary Indian photographer. In her work, she 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. In the series on display, Creatures of Passage, Sheetal explores the emotions we experience while watching a film collectively in a cinema hall alongside a stranger in the next seat. She is drawn to the feeling that resonates in these empty spaces addressing the unspoken relationships that bind people to spaces and the relationship we continue to have with them.

Shilo Shiv Suleman is an artist whose work is sustained by commitments to magical realism, poetry, technology and social justice. In the series on display Queen Conch, Shilo references the ancient timeless tales of the archetypal divine feminine. Aphrodite, Venus, Oshun, Lakshmi, Isis, Chalchiuhtlicue, primeval pre-Islamic goddesses and visions of divine feminine appear. She emerges resplendent, bedecked in silk, shell and gold. As with much of Shilo’s work – this is a darshan, a glance and a remembrance of the sacred feminine in all her forms. Queen Conch makes a softer world of gold and shell, and appears as a revelation, and adoration of the oceanic, primordial feminine.

In the open area of the fair, Shilo Shiv Suleman is displaying Shankha, a large scale installation in brass. With ‘Shankha’, Shilo reclaims the sensuality of India’s architectural past, creating a brass sculpture of a cowrie shell that acts as an object of worship. The cowrie shell in India was considered a valuable measure of trade and economic sustenance, a charm worn by the Banjara community to ward off dark spirits, and a symbol of feminine emergence, fertility and from the Samudra Manthan. It represents the theme – India and the world, but also stands as a symbol for an unabashed Sapphic earth feminine.

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Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai, with their exhibition ‘Transfigurations’, featuring bas relief sculptures in brass by eminent Indian master Sakti Burman.

Sakti Burman is a pilgrim of complex allegiances. Born in Kolkata in 1935, Burman moved to France in 1959, where he studied, lived and worked until 2019, participating fully in French cultural life; and yet, he emphatically retained his association with India through long-term friendships, continuing professional collaborations, and frequent visits. At the core of his practice is the confluence among cultures, mythologies, periods, and places. Various Indian and European pasts inhabit his art, drawing from mythology, the Mughal miniature ateliers, from Kalighat as well as West European art history and Bengali popular culture.

To quote from the catalogue essay, authored by cultural theorist and art historian Ranjit Hoskote, “Sakti Burman’s recent suite of bas relief sculptures, based on images that have preoccupied him over the decades, reminds us of the tableaux of classical sculpture as featured on the grand doors and elevations of churches, the friezes of public buildings and the exteriors of temple complexes. In a medium that is new to the artist, Burman brings us, again, into the presence of the figures and situations that have fascinated him. Translated or rather transfigured from one medium to another, Sakti Burman’s images breathe a new air, seek our attention afresh. Importantly, these sculptures take the precise form of the fragment, the detail from a larger or lost whole that speaks allusively of that whole. Burman’s sculptural fragments, although complete in themselves, speak to us of the far longer choreography that is his life, his visceral connection to two civilisations and continents, his singular and courageous devotion to the artist’s vocation, which survives all challenges and cataclysms

Art Musings opens Garden; Forest; Meadow, featuring a group exhibition. This monsoon edit is an ode to Nature, as the earth rejuvenates and is flush with exquisite blooms. Tapestries of flowering shrubs and trees full of fruit and flower, celebrate the cycle of nature. The magic and the wisdom of the eternal garden fills the artworks, and transports the viewer into the land of abundance and plenitude. The lineup of artists includes Maïté Delteil, Maya Burman, Shilo Shiv Suleman, Samir Mondal, Rakhee Shenoy, Suneel Mamadapur, Sanju Jain and Nitish Bhattacharjee.

‘Visages’, at Art Musings features a group of established artists including Baiju Parthan, Paresh Maity, Raghava KK, Laxma Goud, Neeraj Goswami, Shibu Natesan, Sunil Padwal. Facial expression presented by an artist is often within a specific context. Its purpose as a visual cue is to trigger thought processes and evoke emotional responses, regardless of the style – abstract, figurative, or non-representational.

Baiju Parthan’s lenticular work ‘Seizure’ made by layering street photography with material gathered from the internet,  explores the moment when an epiphany is triggered by an unexpected event, like an unexpected blow from the Zen master’s walking stick hishaku that can induce a seizure to bring on Satori in meditator. Here the mundane occurrence of a police intervention at a traffic junction is presented as a metaphor for an unexpected event leading to epiphany. In Paresh Maity’s dynamic mixed media painting ‘Golden Gaze’, the angular faces, with their myriad expressions, are closely cropped and juxtaposed with their surroundings. Rendered in a distinctive palette of brown and shadowed yellows, with the interplay of light and shadow, the bold geometric faces stare at you piercingly. Raghava KK’s series ‘Through the Looking Glass’ comprise of a suite of small charcoal portraits of a child. His innate curiosity allows him to explore the myriad possibilities of what can he be next. Laxma Goud, best known for his early drawings that depict eroticism in a rural context, presents early aquatint intaglio & etchings. These interpretations of memories of rural and tribal vivacity through an urban grid, display surreal libidinal tones that mingle fantasy and poetry. The angular geometrical posturing in Neeraj Goswami’s charcoal drawings yield to lyrical moments of repose. Goswami plays with form, breaking them deliberately to bring about a symmetrical geometry of shapes Distortion he eschews and paints figures that are stylised abstracted explorations of the anatomy. In the monochromatic works of Shibu Natesan’s Mastan and Sunil Padwal’s untitled portrait, artistic interpretations remind us of the profound connections and reflections that faces can evoke in our shared human experience. Bold and simple, the works are bereft of any superfluous details, while the layered technique adds a dramatic dimension to the paintings.

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Art Musings previews their next exhibition ‘Braided’, with on Thursday, 11 April ’24, showcasing works in mixed media by contemporary photographer Sheetal Mallar. The exhibition will also see the release of her self-published photobook, and explores intergenerational intimacies. While experimenting with analogue on expired film, Sheetal takes you back into a world of fading memories and childhood stories. Sheetal began this body of work as an attempt to reconnect back to the women in her family. Going back to her core relationships, the artist looks at loss and how memories function. The work is about revealing these layers, using photography, drawings and text.
Says Sheetal about this project, “I had been away from home for a long time. I wanted to look at the bonds we share with our maternal lineage. I believe it is a circle that’s just as vulnerable, as it is strong. It’s been cathartic for me, looking at relationships that have been at my core. In some ways, this work has been an attempt to reconnect back with them and find my way back home and to parts of myself that I had lost. I wanted to look at memory, loss, and ageing as a woman

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Art Musings is participating in the upcoming edition of the India Art Fair, held in Delhi, 01 – 04 February 2024, showcasing works by 7 leading artists. The line-up includes Sakti Burman, Anjolie Ela Menon, Maïté Delteil, Nilofer Suleman, Maya Burman, and Sheetal Mallar, along with an immersive space displaying works by Shilo Shiv Suleman.

 The stellar lineup is headed by Indian masters Sakti Burman and Anjolie Ela Menon. While Sakti’s paintings seem to exist outside the measurable flow of time in a world of reverie and fantasia populated by mythic beings and personae, Anjolie’s series of portraits and heads draw inspiration from her daily encounters with people whom she meets, as well as her extensive travels that have crept into her work from her stays in India and Europe.

 The mother-daughter duo of Maïté Delteil and Maya Burman showcase their dreamlike works in their trademark style. In the space of Maïté’s universe, her oil on canvas work ‘Happiness’ plays 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. Maya Burman is presenting an immersive multi-layered experiential dreamscape scroll work ‘Lotus Pond’, set in a background of a lotus pond, peopled by pneumatic figures, depicted in moments of play and festivity expressive of an abundant joie de vivre.

 Master storyteller Nilofer Suleman fills her large canvas ‘Unani Dawakhana’ with kaleidoscopic imagery, nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within framed narratives and larger, circulating cycles of tales. 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 paintings embody the spirit of collage through which the artists of the Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and Adilshahi ateliers bore witness to their experience of a complex and multi-dimensional world nourished by diverse sources of cultural inspiration. The movie poster, the signboard, street graffiti, studio portraiture, the devotional oleograph – all these demotic forms of expression inform her work, as do the more restrained painterly idioms of the temple, the court and the marketplace. In Suleman’s realm of exquisite illusions, both windows and carpets open onto vistas, and the elements of her architecture are liable to grow wings.

 Through the immersive space which holds the body of work ‘God is a Woman in Love’, multi-media artist Shilo Shiv Suleman tosses and turns like the samudhra manthan, chooses consort, unfolds into eight Ashtanayikas, makes an altar of most intimate. Indian mythology offers more lovelore to us than any other cosmology. Here love sovereign presides eternal and yet our loves remain mortal, trying, fickle, confused, abandoned, incomplete, like ghosts. The Ashtanayikas in the Natya Shastra are archetypal romantic heroines that repeat themselves across sculpture, classical dance and painting. Comprising large paintings alongside sculptures made in semi-precious stones embedded in brass, the solo space creates a Venusian kingdom of overgrown orchids and comes to the conclusion that the most divine and resplendent form of god is a woman herself.

Sheetal Mallar debuts her photo work at the art fair. Mallar is interested in the delicate, unspoken relationships that bind people to places. Her ongoing projects engage with the Interpersonal relationships and culture. On display at the fair are works from her project ‘Braided’. The fair will also see the release of the photobook, which features photographs and sketches of her grandmother, and explores intergenerational intimacies.

Says Sheetal about this project, which has been 12 years in the making, “I had been away from home for a long time. I wanted to look at the bonds we share with our maternal lineage and the roles they end up playing in shaping our lives. I believe it is a circle that’s just as vulnerable, as it is strong. In some ways, this work has been an attempt to reconnect back with them and find my way back home and to parts of myself that I had lost. I wanted to look at memory, loss, and ageing as a woman

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Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai with ‘Anjolie The Wanton Fabulist’, a solo exhibition that brings together recent works of renowned artist Anjolie Ela Menon. The exhibition coincides with the 2024 edition of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, a robust art event in the city, which opens on 11 January ’24.

Menon’s art has incorporated the resonances of diverse cultures. It was the Romanesque church imagery and the brilliance of a Byzantine palette that caught her imagination and continues to impact her work to this day. Menon’s work is well known for the translucent textures which she creates by using thin glazes on Masonite. Beneath the overlaying of an unmistakable patina her invisible brushstrokes glimmer with a rare radiance. In this body of works, through the mastery of her technique, Menon creates images that come alive but continue to exist in an existential time-warp. 

Menon’s protagonists are mythological figures as well as the ordinary people whom she portrays in her unique style, with great sensitivity. Her paintings, through their texture and stunning coloration, convey the wonder of breath-taking transmutations. Also on display are Menon’s Divine Mothers, which capture all the nuances and magic of motherhood. She takes the viewer on a visual journey drawing from mythology; Yashoda and Krishna, Mariam and the infant Jesus, Parvati and Ganesh. However the divine women are often modelled after the women near her studio in Nizamuddin Basti, lovingly nurturing their young

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Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai, with their next exhibition ‘Reverie & Fantasia’, a group exhibition featuring the family of Indian master Sakti Burman, his illustrious wife Maïté Delteil and their daughter Maya Burman.

At the core of each of their practices is the confluence among cultures, mythologies, periods, and places. As they shuttle between societies and cultures, articulating in their work all the legacies they have inherited, the artists give themselves the freedom to select materials from the archive of global culture. Various Indian and European pasts inhabit their art, drawing from mythology, the Mughal miniature ateliers, from Kalighat as well as West European art history and Bengali popular culture.

Art historian and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote has written extensively about the works of all three artists. To quote from some of his texts from various books and catalogues with Art Musings,

“To enter Sakti Burman’s landscapes and tableaux, is to submit to the measures of a dance that takes us deeper, not only into the recesses of a possibly shared mythic consciousness, but also into the complexity of the artist’s particular life – in the space of excitement, exhilaration, anxiety and epiphany between two cultures. Burman’s art is resonant with the metaphor of the actor, the theatre, the masque. We are in the landscape of lila, where everyone plays a significant part and no detail is irrelevant. Burman the storyteller reinvigorates our imagination by reminding us we are not simply made of muscle, nerve and bone. We are also made up of the words and images, the poems and stories we inherit from countless previous generations.

When we stand in the presence of Maïté Delteil’s art, we recognise instantly that, at its core, there lie the regenerative powers of the garden, the orchard, the meadow, the pasture, and the forest. No matter what the scale of her paintings, each frame breathes the life force of an earth that has been tilled and harrowed, tended and nurtured, or protected from intervention. In her vibrant images, we encounter earth as it has been cultivated or left to its own ebullient devices; we hear the voices of the natural world here, with the wind blowing through branches and the choric intimations of birdsong. Delteil’s attentiveness to detail is a form of devotion: her paintings  are songs of praise,  in which she  exalts  the beauty  of things  even  as  they pass into decay  and  dissolution,  as creatures of time.

Maya Burman’s watercolour and pen and-ink works are peopled by pneumatic figures, usually depicted in moments of play, festivity or ceremonial, expressive of an abundant joie de vivre or what, in the Indic tradition, would be celebrated as lila, the cosmic spirit of play and creativity. Drawing on diverse genealogies, among them Degas’ ballerinas and folk and classical dancers of eastern India. Maya portrays her protagonists 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. The artist’s immersion in the European and Indic civilisations manifests itself, as does her lifelong exposure to the history of art, through the details of her work.”

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Art Musings presents a group show ‘MELT’ featuring acclaimed artists SH Raza, KG Subramanyan, Satish Gujral, Ganesh Haloi, GR Iranna, Laxma Goud, Gopikrishna, Suneel Mamadapur, Raghava KK, Shilo Shiv Suleman, Jayasri Burman, Smriti Dixit, which opens on November 23.

Art is defined in many ways, but essentially it captures the essence of a subject that the artist chooses to deliberate upon. MELT, which features cross-generational artists, draws our attention to how artists have used nature as an inspiration or as a motif. Beyond capturing its tangible beauty, observation of the natural world has lent itself to examining a broad spectrum of subjects that concern metaphysics, spirituality, the personal, the behavioural, or the societal.

The iconography the artists hone is indicative of what aspects of nature have inspired their thought processes. SH Raza’s Bindu paintings are contemplations on the beginnings of life, the cycle of life and death and the concept of time and space. Ganesh Haloi paints abstract landscapes that articulate the experiences of the human mind. The physical terrain is a trope to depict a psychological space. The melodies in nature, in poetry and manmade music inform Satish Gujral’s works. His art answers the question of what it is like to hear with your eyes.

The motif that recurs in KG Subramanyan’s art is still life with a flower vase inside a lived space. This contrasts with a work from an earlier period, which depicts a cluster of windswept trees under the open sky in a forest. Could they represent opposite psychological states of the mind – perhaps calm and troubled, safe and insecure? Laxma Goud also uses trees as motifs alongside animal and human figures. His etchings bristle with raw sexuality, a natural condition of living beings. GR Iranna uses the motif of trees in full bloom to address issues that are social and political, moral and spiritual.

The depiction of flora is recurrently used to tackle the ideas of germination and femininity, as can be seen in the stylised visual languages of Jayasri Burman and Shilo Shiv Suleman. Smriti Dixit tackles these concepts in an abstract language with artworks that are made of woven fabric and emphasise tactile textures.

We see a dissimilarity in the visuals and the idioms used by contemporary artists such as Gopikrishna and Suneel Mamadapur, even though the references to nature are visible. Their zoo-anthropomorphic iconography is fabulist and absurd, which addresses the issues of the human condition. Treading on the sci-fi genre, Raghava KK’s other-worldly, futuristic portrayals are an examination of the conflicts between the natural world, science, technology and human nature.