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.
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.”
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.
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.
Doorways II is the second in the series of three exhibitions as we adjust to the new normal. Doorways II features works by various artists in different mediums and subject matter, each work opening up to lead us into the special vision of its creator, into the artist’s unique experience of the world. You can choose to come to the gallery and view the works in a designated time slot, or we can arrange for you to see them in the privacy of your homes. We would like to thank all our patrons and well-wishers as we travel through these strange times together, and a big thank you to all our artists, who continue to inspire awe and wonder.
Art Musings begins the season with a new exhibition on 10th September 2020. As we invite visitors back to our gallery after a six-month gap, we would encourage you to call ahead and make appointments, to allow us to effectively practise social distancing norms. We assure you that all safety measures are in place and our spaces are sanitised.
Doorways features works by various artists in different mediums and subject matter, each work opening up to lead us into the special vision of its creator, into the artist’s unique experience of the world. We would like to thank all our patrons and well-wishers as we travel through these strange times together, and a big thank you to all our artists, who continue to inspire awe and wonder.
Art Musings is presenting a group show featuring acclaimed artists Laxma Goud, T. Vaikuntam and Samir Mondal which opens on 11 March ‘20. The exhibition features paintings in oils, acrylic & watercolour as well as etchings and sculptures in their trademark style.
Works on display by Laxma Goud include a variety of mediums including etching, gouache, pastel, sculpture, and glass painting. Early works on display include masterful small paintings of village life in a palette of monochrome greys in pen and ink, and his drawings and etchings from this period are an interesting combination of village nostalgia, the surreal, and the erotic. Also on display are recent reverse glass paintings in a more decorative style.
Vaikuntam draws inspiration for his work from the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. Women, in particular, are frequent subjects for his works. The love for this subject can be traced back to his fascination with theatre groups that travelled to and performed in his village. His work has a distinctly raw, rustic and potent flavour.
Samir Mondal is one of India’s leading watercolour painters. His subjects include starkly vibrant portraits of women, as well as floral landscapes. The bold striking watercolours are radiant in their rendering. Mondal has incorporated the inherent quality, richness and substance of the medium of oil, and has developed textures and structural features into his watercolour works giving them vitality and depth.
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.
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.