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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.

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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.

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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.