Art Musings presents its 2023 edition of ‘Quarto’, which features works by four artists, whose works cover different genres but come together in alchemic harmony. This edition features works by Baiju Parthan, Prabhakar Kolte, Samir Mondal and Smriti Dixit.
The paintings on display by Baiju Parthan reflect the artist’s long standing interest in ethnobotany, and plants that generate psychoytopic substances the poppy flower with its perception shifting potential is used as a metaphor marking a threshold, and an entry point into domain of the metaphysical.
With colour, line and the occasional vestige of form as his basic vocabulary, Prabhakar Kolte has elaborated a lifelong music of allusion, half-glimpsed order and an elusive beauty. 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 and brushstroke. On display is a large canvas work along with a suite of smaller works.
Samir Mondal’s bold striking watercolors 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 watercolor works giving them vitality and depth. Mondal presents a series of monochromatic works featuring floral motifs.
Smriti Dixit delights in multiple media, working with textile, thread, mass-produced plastic objects and pigment. Her works often riff on recycling processes, and assume a variety of avatars that are by turns painterly, sculptural and performative. the cosmic drama of birth, dying and regeneration are performed through her artistic activity and its outcomes, and the space that it occupies and extends even as it extends itself.