| Home | Artists | Works | Links | Contact |
|
|
|
|
M.F.Husain
A self-taught artist, Maqbool Fida Husain was born in 1915 in Maharashtra. At an early age he learnt the art of calligraphy and practiced the Kulfic khat with its geometric forms. He also learnt to write poetry while staying with an uncle in a madrasa in Baroda, an art that has stayed with him through his life. His early education was perfunctory but Husain's love of drawing was evident even at this stage. Whenever he got a chance he would strap his painting gear to his bicycle and drive out to the surrounding countryside of Indore to paint the landscape. In 1937 he reached Mumbai determined to become an artist, with hardly any money and lived m a cheap room in a by lane inhabited by pimps and prostitutes. Initially Husain apprenticed himself to a painter of cinema hoardings which he would paint with great dexterity perched on scaffolding sometimes in the middle of traffic.
Husain was noticed for the first time in 1947 when he won an award at the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society. Subsequently he was invited by Souza to join the Progressive Artist's Group. A great deal of experimentation in the early years led to some remarkable works Re Between The Spider And The Lamp, Zameen and Man. By 1955 he was one of the leading artists in India and had been awarded the Padma Shri. He was a special invitee along with Pablo Picasso at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1971. Along with several solo exhibitions he had major retrospectives in Mumbai in 1969, in Calcutta in 1973 and in Delhi in 1978. He has participated in many international shows which include Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1982; Six Indian Painters, Tate Gallery, London 1985; Modem Indian Painting, Hirschhom Museum, Washington 1986 and Contemporary Indian Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York 1986.
In 1967 he won the Golden Bear at the International Film Festival at Berlin for his documentary Through the Eyes of a Painter and has made several short films since then. Husain was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1973, the Padma Vibhushan in 1989 and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986. One of the most charismatic artists in India today, he is known for his emphatic understanding of the human situation and his speedy evocation of it in paint. The early evolution of his painterly language was overtaken by adventurous forays into installations and performance art. His experimentations with new forms of art are both unexpected and pioneering.
Husain has studios in several cities in India but lives mainly in Mumbai.
Ramkumar
Born in Simla in 1924 Ram Kumar did his Masters in Economics from Delhi University. A student at the Sarada Ukil School of Art, Delhi he began to participate in group exhibitions when he was spotted by Raza who becomes a close friend. Ram Kumar left for Paris by boat and studied painting under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in Paris between 1949-52. He has held several solo exhibitions like the International Biennales in Tokyo in 1957 and 1970, the Venice Biennale 1958 and in Sao Paulo in 1961, 1965 and 1972. He has also participated in the Festival of India shows in the then USSR and Japan in 1987 and 1988. Rarn Kumar received the Padma Shri in 1971. He also writes short stories in Hindi and four collections of his works have been published. He has received the Prem Chand Puraskar from the U.P. Government for Meri Priya Kahaniyan, a collection of short stories.
The human condition is the main concern of the painter manifested in his early works by the alienated individual within the city Later the city, specifically Varanasi with its dilapidated, crammed houses conveys a sense of hopelessness. Increasingly abstract works done in sweeping strokes of paint evoke both exultation of natural spaces and more recently an incipient violence within human habitation.
Ram Kumar lives and works in New Delhi.
S.H.Raza
Syed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh and studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J.J.School of Art. A founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group Raza participated actively in the Group's activities, stimulated may discussions in the early struggle to develop a modernist language and presented several exhibitions of his paintings in India before leaving for France on a French Government scholarship in 1950. In Paris he studied painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1950 to 1953.
Awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris in 1956, Raza has held numerous exhibitions both in India and abroad. He has participated in the Venice, Sao Paulo and Menton Biennales and has held retrospective shows the most recent being in 1997 in Mumbai, Bhopal and New Delhi The University of California invited him as a visiting lecturer at the art department of Berkeley in 1962. In December 1978 the Madhya Pradesh Government invited him to his native state for a homage and an exhibition of his work in Bhopal. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981 and was elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1983. In 1997 Raza was awarded the Madhya Pradesh Government's prestigious Kalidas Samman.
A strong colourist Raza's painting resonate the passionate hot colours of India with all their symbolic, emotive value. While drawing from memories of childhood spent in the forests he has also been inspired by Indian metaphysical thought. Many of his paintings have a dark circular focal point termed the Bindu which. according to him is the fountainhead of both energy and creativity The strong colours and geometric shapes in Raza's paintings have sometimes been mistaken for neo-Tantrik art but according to the artist there is no affiliation with that school. Pre-occupied with imminent energies, he is a modernist involved with the plastic qualities of art and its emergence on the surface. Raza lives and works in Paris and in Gorbio in south France.
K.H.Ara
Krishnaji Howlaji Ara was born
in 1913, in Bolarum (near Hyderabad), Andhra Pradesh. He moved to Mumbai at the
age of seven and made his first living cleaning cars. In his youth, he joined
the Salt Satyagraha during India's Independence movement and later worked as a
car cleaner in a Japanese firm. His Japanese employer disappeared after Japan’s
attack on the Pearl Harbour, but Ara continued to live and work in the small
servant’s room of the firm’s office, which served as his studio for the rest of
his life.
An entirely self-taught artist, Ara's work was rooted in the joy of creativity,
focusing on nudes, still life and human figure studies. He was the first
contemporary Indian painter to methodically use the female nude as a subject,
staying within the limits of naturalism. His work was appreciated, encouraged
and supported by the then art critic for the 'Times of India', Rudy von Leyden.
Ara had his first solo show in 1942 in the Chetana Restaurant in Mumbai. In
1944, he was awarded the Governor's prize for painting.
He was a founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group and had several shows
with the rest of this group. In 1952, he received the Bombay Art Society's Gold
Medal for his work 'Two Jugs". He was a member of the managing committee of the
Bombay Art Society and served on the selection and judging committees of the
Lalit Kala Akademi. In his later years he spent much of his time in the Artists'
Centre.
Ara began his journey of art with a fair degree of academism, with scenes from
his surroundings and portraits reminiscent of Bombay's colonial painters,
following which elements of the Bengal School began to show in his work. Some
influences of Cezanne and Matisse were evident in his still lives of '40s and
'50s, and though fluent with the formal ways of Modernism, Ara also successfully
drew inspiration from the classics.
His favoured media initially were watercolors and gouaches, which would at
times resemble oils in the impasto effect. Later he also worked successfully in
oils, where occasionally as in “Woman with Flowers”, the relatively thin
pigmentation would remind of his previous preference for the watercolor.
F.N.Souza
Francis Newton Souza's unrestrained and graphic style creates thought provoking and powerful images. His repertoire of subjects covers still life, landscape, nudes and icons of Christianity, rendered boldly in a frenzied distortion of form. Souza's paintings express defiance and impatience with convention and with the banality of everyday life.
His works have reflected the influence of various schools of art: the folk art of his native Goa, the full-blooded paintings of the Renaissance, the religious fervor of the Catholic Church, the landscapes of the 18th and 19th century Europe and the path-breaking paintings of the moderns. A recurrent theme in his works is the conflict in a man - woman relationship, with an emphasis on sexual tension and friction. In his drawings, he uses line with economy, while still managing to capture fine detail in his forms; or he uses a profusion of crosshatched strokes that make up the overall structure of his subject.
F.N. Souza was born in India in 1924 and is of Goan Christian origin. He was one of the co-founders of the Progressive Artists' Movement along with M.F. Husain, Raza, Ara and others. He received the Guggenheim International Award, and his works are in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London, the National Gallery in New Delhi, and the Baroda Museum, Baroda. He has exhibited extensively in London, as well as in India and the U.S.
Tyeb Mehta
Born in Gujarat in 1925 Tyeb Mehta spent an initial period working as a film editor in a cinema laboratory. Its interest in painting however took him to the Sir J.J. School of Art from where he received his diploma in 1952. A close friend of the Progressive Artists Group with considerable stylistic affiliation he left for London where he lived and worked between 1959 and 1964. He visited the U. S. on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1968. His film Koodal, a powerful depiction of the ordinary man's dilemma won the Film fare Critic's Award in 1970. As an Artist in Residence in Santiniketan between 1984-85 he returned to Mumbai with significant changes in his work.
Apart from several solo exhibitions Mehta has participated in international shows like Ten Contemporary Indian Painters at Trenton in the U.S. in 1965; Deuxieme Biennial Internationale de Menton, 1974; Festival Intemationale de la Peinture, Cagnes- -Sur-Mer, France 1974; Modem Indian Paintings at Hirschhom Museum, Washington 1982, and Seven Indian Painters at Gallerie Le Monde de U art, Paris 1994. He was awarded the Kalidas Samman by the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1988. Mehta's preoccupation with formalist means of expression have led to matt surfaces, broken with diagonals and imagery which while expressing a deep anguish is specifically painterly. In recent years there has been a vivid articulation of mythological figures like Kali in a mode mist, symbolic manner. Increasingly his work uses imagery which is ancient yet powerfully modem.
Mehta lives and works in Mumbai.
Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee an inveterate modernist was born in 1928 and received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. He left for Paris in 1951 and lived and worked there till his return in 1967. Among several shows he has had major retrospectives in Mumbai and New Delhi in 1980. He has participated in the exhibitions, Seven Indian Painters, Gallery One, London in 1958'Intemational Biennales at Venice; Sao Paulo and Tokyo; Museum of Modem Art, Oxford, 198 1; Royal Academy of Arts, Festival of India, London 1982;Indian Artists in France, Paris 1985 among others. In 1967 he was invited as Artist-in Residence by the Stout State University, Wisconsin, USA.
Padamsee was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1969 with which he started an inter-arts workshop in Mumbai. To this day it is remembered for the creative stimulation it provided to artists and fiilmakers. Mani Kaul's film 'Duvidha', Padamsee's own films' Events in a Cloud Chamber'and Syzygy workshop and Kumar Shahani's short film were a result of the workshop. A student of Sanskrit he is well versed in texts like the Upanishads.
Padamsee's forms bounded by the line and created from an assemblage of strokes on the surface are both real and transcendent. His experiments with the Chinese method of 'ku fu' have also lent his figures an agile grace. If the forms carry an expression of ineffable sadness, there are periods when he paints landscapes which express the grandeur of infinite time. In recent years he had painted Diptychs which are relative versions of the same landscape.
Padamsee lives and works in Mumbai
Krishen Khanna
Born in Lahore in 1925, Krishen Khanna moved to Shimla during the partition. In Lahore Khanna had attended evening classes at the Mayo School of Art. After arriving in India he took up a post with the Grindlays Bank and was placed in Mumbai. Once there Khanna was invited to join the Progressive Artists' Group with whom he remained in active association for the rest of his time. In Mumbai he held his first major exhibition and sold his first painting to Dr. Homi Bhabha for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Khanna was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 and was Artist in Residence at the ameiican University in Washington in 1963-64. Apart from several one man shows he has participated in group shows like the Tokyo Biennale 1957 and 196 1, the Sao Paulo Biennale 1960, the Venice Biennale 1962, the Festival of India in the then USSR and in Japan in 1987 and 19 88. Khanna has held several important positions in decision-making bodies of the Lalit Kala Akademi, National Gallery of Modem Art and Roopanker Museum, Bhopal. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1996.
Making a gestural impact on the canvas Khanna's masterful deployment of paint to evoke the human situation is unmatched. The thick impasto surface often seems like a prism through which figures can be discerned as if in memory or in remote areas of childhood. Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.
Jahagir Sabavala
Born in Mumbai in 1922 Jehangir Sabavala received his diploma from the J.J. School of Art in 1944. He went on to study at the Heatherley School of Art, London between 1945-47 and then to Paris where he was at the Academic Andre Lhote between 1948-51 and the Academic Julian between 1953-54. He also studied at the Academic de la Grande Chaumiere in 1957.
Apart from several one man shows, Sabavala has participated at the Salon National Independent, Paris 1950, the Venice Biennial, 1954; the Commonwealth Arts Festival' London 1965; Contemporary Art ftom India, Washington 1975; Asian Artists Exhibition, Fukuoka Art Museum, Tokyo, 1979 and Modem Indian Painting, Hischhorn Museum Washington 1982. Apart from several international auctions he has also participated in 'Chamatkar-Fantasy in Indian Art' presented by CIMA Gallery at Whiteleys' London 1996. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1977. Sabavala, practicing in the modernist mode creates wedges of paint which form vast, still landscapes. The human form which began to appear in a diminutive form, enveloped in solitude have begun to emerge appear in diminutive form, enveloped in solitude have began to emerge in close ups and yet retain the distance of a remembered past.
Sabavala lives and works in Mumbai.
Anjolie Ela Menon
Anjolie Ela Menon was born in 1940 in India of mixed Bengal and American parentage. She went to school in Lovedale in the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu and thereafter had a brief spell at the J.J. School of art in Bombay. Subsequently she earned a degree of English Literature from Delhi University. After holding solo Exhibitions in Bombay and Delhi in the late 1950s as a teenager, N4enon worked and studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1961-62 on a French Government scholarship. Before returning home, she traveled extensively in Europe and West Asia studying Romanesque and Byzantine art. Since then she has lived and worked in India, in England, the U.S.A., Germany and the erstwhile USSR. She had over thirty solo shows including at Black heath Gallery-London, Gallery Radicke-Bonn, Winston Gallery-Washington, Doma Khudozhinkov-USSR, Rabindra Bhavanand Shridharani Gallery-New Delhi, Academy of Fine Arts-Calcutta, the Gallery-Madras, Jehangir Gallery, Chemould Gallery, Taj Gallery, Bombay and Maya Gallery at the Museum Annexe, Hong Kong. A retrospective exhibition was held in 1988 in Bombay, Menon has participated in several international or shows in France, Japan, Russia and U.S.A.
In addition to paintings in private and corporate collections, her works have been acquired by museums in India and abroad. She is also a well-known muralist and has represented India at he Algiers Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil and three triennials in New Delhi. She has been invited by the British Council, the U.S. State Department and the French Ministry of Culture to confer with leading artists in those countries. Menon @as served on the advisory committee and the art purchase - committee of the National Gallery of Modem Art, New Delhi, where she was co-curator with Henri Claude Cousseau for a rnajor exhibition of French Contemporary Art in 1996. Her work recently went under the hammer at the Christie's and Sotheby's auctions of Contemporary Indian Art in London. A book titled "ANJOLIE ELA MENON: Paintings in Private Collections" has been published on her life and work.
Menon lives and works in Delhi.
Jogen Choudhury
Jogen Chowdhury was born in a village near Kotaliparha at Faridpur district at what is now Bangladesh in 1939. The family moved to Calcutta in 1947 following the Partition of Bengal. Chowdhury entered the Government College of Art and Crafts in 1955 and graduated from the college in 1960.
Chowdhury's first job was as an art teacher in a school in Howrah. He taught there for two years and then in 1962, he joined a textile designer in the Handloom Board In 1965, Chowdhury went to Paris and studied in Ecole des Beaux Arts and in William Hayter's Atelier 17. He returned to Indian in early 1968 and went to Madras as a textile designer in the Handloom Board. He stayed there for four years till 1972. His first book of poems was published in 1970. The same year he joined the Calcutta Painters Group.
Chowdhury moved to Delhi in 1972 as the curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhawan. In 1975, he along with some leading Delhi artists founded Gallery 26 and Artists' Forum. From 1976, onwards, Chowdhury participated in several exhibitions and art camps abroad. He published ajoumal called Art Today in 1981 with Shuvaprasanna. In 1987, Chowdhury joined Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan as professor of painting. Besides his numerous activities, Chowdhury has written extensively on contemporary art.
Always a powerful artist, Chowdhury developed his individual style after his return from France in the late '60s. Although Chowdhury has painted oils, his forte is painting in ink, water colour and pastel. The sinuous line contouring the flaccid figures, the crosshatching to achieve tonal variations distinguish C'howdhury's paintings which show men and women m enigmatic situations with provocative gestures placed in a dark dream- space. There is a bit of the theatre of the absurd. Chowdhury lives and works in Sandniketan.
N.S.Bendre
N.S. Bendre (1910-1992) was born in Indore and was initially trained in the State Art School, Indore, prior to taking the Government Diploma in Art from Bombay in 1933. His initial interests were conditioned by the quasi-modemist landscape painting as practiced in the Indore School at the beginning of the 20th century. An avid traveller, Bendre continued to paint the landscape throughout his career, often with different stylistic means. Early recognition came with the Silver Medal from the Bombay Art Society in 1934, followed by the then ultimate honour of the Gold Medal in 194 1. Part of the year 1945 was spent as artist in residence at Sanfiffiketan, where he met Nandalal Bose, Rain Kinkar Baij and Binode Behari Mukhedee, and in Calcutta, Jamini Roy. Bendre's early work has been classified as being academic and impressionist, dominant subjects being the landscape and the portrait, in oils and gouache.
The year 1947 saw Bendre back in Bombay, in the June of which year he departed for the United States, holding a solo exhibition at the Windermere Gallery, New York, in 1948. On his way back to India, Bendre traveled through Europe, gaining exposure to original works of the modernist masters. An independent nation and an art scene animated by the adventure of the Progressive Artists Group greeted his return in the March of 1948.
In 1950, Bendre moved to Baroda as the first Reader and Head of the Department of Painting at the Faculty of fine Arts. He was to remain there till 1966, becoming Dean of the Faculty in 1959. He was instrumental in laying the foundations of the new programme at the Faculty. It was here that he embarked upon a phase held as his most important, which involved experiments with Cubist, Expressionist and abstract tendencies, producing such works as Thorn (1955, National Award)', Sunflowers, The Parrot and the Chameleon, which give evidence of his shifting allegiances to currents in mainstream European modernism, and his endeavor to marry these with Indian formal and thematic considerations.
Travels continued, within India and internationally: he visited West Asia and London in 1958, the USA and Japan in 1962. The adventure of modernism that Bendre carried from Bombay to B aroda bore fruit in the formation of the Baroda Group of artists in 1956. Along with Bendre, several of the first generation of his students at Baroda were members of the Group, which held regular shows in Bombay, Ahmedabad and Baroda, providing wide exposure to work being produced at the new art school.
After he resigned from Baroda in 1966, Bendre experimented with his version of pointillism and held shows in Bombay every alternate year. He was awarded Padamshri by the President of India in 1969. He was elected to chair the International Jury at the Second Triennale in New Delhi in 1971 an as fellow of the Lalit Kala Academi in 1974. His illustrious carrier was recognized further with a Retrospective Exhibition at the Lalit kala Academi in 1974, the Aban-Gagan Award from Viswa Bharati University in 1984, and the Kalidas Samman in 1984.
He continues to pain till he passed away in February 18th 1992.
K.K.Hebbar
Krishna Hebbar was born in 1911 in Karnataka and received his diploma from the Sir J J School of Art in 1938. He taught art at the School from 1940 to 1945. While being influenced by the academic style taught at the School, Hebbar felt a strong urge to paint in a genre which drew from traditional Indian art. A visit to Europe in 1949 exposed him to some of the best works in western art and he finally settled down to study at the Academy Julian in Paris.
The definitive form begins to take shape in Hebbar's work on his return from Europe. An adroit draughtsman, his studies like Mahim Darga won him the National Award in 1956 to be followed by awards in the annual exhibitions of the in 1957 and 195 8. Hebbar had also received the Gold Medal of the Bombay Art Society in 1947. He was Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1980 and President of the Bombay Art Society in 1990. The Padamshri was awarded to the veteran artist in 1961 and the Padma Bhushan in 1989. He died at the age of 85 in 1996.
Among several important shows both in India and abroad, Hebbar had participated in international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Tokyo Biennale. His concern with the human condition made him focus on themes like poverty, hunger and the destruction wrought by war and the nuclear explosion. At the same time he was acutely sensitive to music and dance and once having learnt the dance form Kathak had made many paintings in brilliant hues of dancers and performers. He will be best remembered for his eminently human paintings which draw from Indian colors and forms.
Jamini Roy
Jamini Roy was born in 1887 in a village of the Bankura district in West Bengal, an area especially rich with a folk art tradition. In 1903 with the consent of his father, he arrived in calcutta and enrolled there in the Govt. School of Art. Despite his ready success, he had, by 1925, begun experimenting along the lines of popular bazaar paintings sold outside the Kalighat temple, Calcutta. By the early 1930s he had made a complete switch to indigenous materials, following the Kalighat idiom back to its source in the scroll paintings of the Bengal countryside.
Roy's pictures become very popular during the 1940s and clientele included both the Bengali middle class and European community. In 1946, his work was exhibited in London; in 1953 in New York. He was honored with the State award of Padma Bhushan in 1955. He died in 1972 in Calcutta.
Laxma Goud
Laxma Goud was born in Nizampur, Andhra Pradesh in 1940. After a diploma in drawing and painting from the Government College of Art and Architecture, Hydrabad in 1963 he studied mural painting and printmaking at M.S. University, Baroda (1963-65).
From the beginning finding fascination in erotic subjects, by the late ' 60s he evolved a distinct style in his etchings which portrayed a pan-natural sexuality seen in terms of impulsive, aggressive passions rather than those of fertility. Basing on childhood memories or rural and tribal vivacity with its open, ribald Eros and its immersion in nature, he interpreted it through a sophisticated urban mode in which surreal, libidinal tones mingle with fantasy and poetry. Moods are conveyed there in a hybridal imagery of explicitly aroused human beasts and birds, phallic and vaginal trees and boulders, set among intricately lush and stirred forliage. Dramatically deposed and gesturing, his characters reveal an expressionist note whose harshness is tampered by the finely curlicued, linear details and dark palpable textures. This obsession has continued with Goud throughout the. subsequent variations in attitude, technique and style. By the late'70s, when he resorted largely to the subtler medium of aquatint his figures softened and became more direct as well as more evocative in their somewhat subdued and psychologised look. The realist ingredient present in the highly and ornately contoured shapes brings in an element of actual appearance of villagers but is steered towards a gentle stylization, which imposes on figures a touch of rustic puppets. All the while Goud has been painting chiefly water colors with single village women and men often with goats, also rural scenes. They are a robust draughtsman's paintings, line based and colored, aesthetic vacillating between a relatively realistic but generalized rendering a supple, expressionist distortion. In 1975 Goud did harshly delicate pencil drawings of junk objects in close-ups, isolate yet bearing an imprint of people who use them. Those were eventually absorbed into the drawings of villagers whose bodies hardened by weather, labour and interaction began to resemble leather- pierced and stitched by metallic jewellery of screws and pins. In the mid 80s, colors entered these images which later for some time veered to playful Pickassoesque and Klee like geometrisations and permeating dislocations of contour to reach a fuller, fleshy plasticity when direct images in landscapes and interior alliterate with hybrid and mythic motifs of human, animal and joint eroticism, the silhouetting stroke being now smoother, simpler and pliant.
Goud lives and works in Hyderabad.
Paresh Maity
At the age of thirty five, Paresh Maity has already proved himself as an artist of rare extraordinary talent and creativity. Today, he ranks among the more important figures of contemporary Indian art.
Born in Bengal, Paresh graduated in Fine Arts from the Govt. College of Art & Craft, Calcutta and obtained his Master of Fine Arts from the Delhi College of Art, topping his class. Through the year he has won many prestigious awards.
At Calcutta he received a solid foundation in the British academic style of painting. He achieved a rare excellence in transparent water colours - with a focus on Nature which captivated and fascinated him totally. At the age of 24, his water colour painting was bought by the British Museum in London. Today, his skill in painting pure water colours is unrivalled in the country and he can capture the nuances of light in Nature with masterly skill.
Later, he gradually moved towards abstraction. The emphasis had shifted from the ' perpetual art of looking ' to the ' conceptual art of invention '. Simultaneously, having travelled widely through India, he has been fascinated by the people and colours of Rajasthan and has created a beautiful series of oils on canvas on the subject and other figurative themes with the same degree of excellence as his water colours.
In a short span of ten years he has held over thirty solo shows and has participated in several prestigious art camps and group shows in India and abroad. He has won acclaim in Europe particularly in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, France and the United Kingdom. Small wonder that at an early age, he has carved a niche for himself amongst the top artists of the country and is well on his way to international recognition.
Jitish Kallat
Born 1974 in Mumbai.
Kallat has a BFA in Painting from the Sir J.J.School of Art, Mumbai, and
was Fellow of the School in 1996-97.
He has participated in Art Chicago presented by Walsh Gallery, Chicago,
2004; Zoom! Art in Contemporary India, Culturgest Museum, Lisbon, 2004;
subTerrain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2003; Drawing Conclusions,
international exhibition of artist-writers, New York Arts Gallery, New
York, 2003; Under Construction, The Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo,
2002; Century City, Tate Modern, London, 2001; Family Resemblances, Birla
Academy of Art and Culture, Mumbai, 2000; the 7th Havana Biennale, Cuba,
2000 and the 1st First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Fukuoka, Japan,1999.
Solo exhibitions include FAQ at Art Rotterdam presented by Willem Baars
Art Consultancy, Holland, 2004; First Information Report, Bose Pacia
Modern, New York, 2002; Milk Route, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 2001;
General Essential, Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore, 2001; and Ibid., Gallery
Chemould, Mumbai, 2000.
Kallat received the Provogue-Society’s Young Achiever Award in 2003 and
the Indo-American Society’s Young Achiever Award as well as the Sanskriti
Award in 2001.
He lives and works in Mumbai.
Bose Krishnamachari
Krihnamachari’s oeuvre
includes a manipulation of photographic elements and bright abstract
spaces. While his canvases operate on a formal capacity, with their
spectacular combination of color, texture and contrasting designs, they
also have a strong intellectual basis. Influenced by the conceptual slant
of much modern British art, a result of his tenure at Goldsmith College,
London, Krishnamachari makes us rethink the connection between signifier
and signified. He questions the validity of the image as a purveyor of
fixed meaning. The Excessive clarity of Krishnamachari’s photo-realist
motifs is imbued with an unsettlingly surreal aura and his abstract
patterns embody a shifting network of signs. As they mischievously evade
definition, his images counteract the idea of a singular truth.
Bose Krishnamachari was born in Kerala and studied at Sir J.J. School of
Art, Mumbai. He has held solo exhibitions at the British Council Division,
Mumbai and at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. He has also
participated in several group shows including ‘Drawings: Group Show’ at
the Gallery Chemould, Mumbai (1990), and ‘Romor City’, Tokyo (2001). He
was a recipient of the Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi award and was first
runner up for the Bose Pacia Prize for Modern Art, New York(2001).
Atul Dodiya
Atul Dodiya was born in 1959 in Mumbai and received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School f Art in 1982. Apart from several solo shows in India he has exhibited at Gallery Apunto, Amsterdam in 1993. He has participated in 'The Richness of the Spirit' Kuwait and Rome in 1986-89, 'India - Contemporary Art' World Trade Center, Amsterdam 1989, 'Exposition Collective' Cite Intemationale Des Arts, Paris 1992. He has also exhibited at 'Reflections and Images' Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Mumbai, 1993 and 'Trends and Images' CIMA, Calcutta, 1993. He was given the Sanskriti Award, New Delhi in 1995.
Dodiya's strongly realistic works are subtly nuanced to provide a reflective medium to middle class homes, family life and his own biography. Thin layers of painting deftly painted strokes, mirror suggestive situations. In his latest works he freely quotes his artistic peers like Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar to reflect on the act of painting itself.
Dodiya lives and works in Mumbai.
Geeta Vadhera
I have been painting
for more than 20 years now. I have painted on canvas, on paper, on
photographs, on wood, on glass, and even on a body! I have been trained as
a painter in the Delhi School of Art and have had the privilege of working
on solo exhibitions across several countries and with several people in
the course of my career.
Sometimes, people come to me and ask , "What do your paintings mean?", or
"How do I appreciate your art?". Alas, there is no formula that I am aware
of. The meaning, if any, is within you, the viewer. It's a function of
your own experiences. Often the "meaning" is wordless. I am reminded of a
zen koan - the zen master keeps filling the cup of tea for his pupil until
it overflows and more. The pupil says, "Stop master.. it is full, it
cannot take any more"; to which the master responds, "Yes, and until you
empty it, there would not be any space for more". So, empty your self.
Take some time and view the work. If there is something which invites you,
look deeply. Maybe there is something you find -?
The experience, or impact, is what I attempt to paint. As I experience
life in its many forms, there are some moments which leave their own
indelible impact on me. A visual impact, a presence which haunts me until
I have exorcised it by putting my brush to the canvas. Each of my works
has its own moment of association and raison d'être. I paint to relate my
inner self, my space, to this association.My invitation to my audience is
to allow just that much space to view, or to relate to, a canvas so that
the painting of a tree isn't just bark and leaves, so that the sea isn't a
body of water. Maybe you discover the lushness within the tree, or,
perhaps the depth of a soul within the sea. This may not
necessarily be the moment I had in mind when I painted, it may just be
your own moment. Perhaps there is a subliminal association.
Yes, there is always the other way of appreciation of Art. Is the hand in
proportion to the head? Does the face look real? Or surreal? Is the colour-scheme
appealing? Is the theme arresting?... it's a long list...In fact, I've
written a series of books on this subject. But to see only this, is to see
the form and not the content.
Ever noticed it when you go to a gallery, view a painting and feel
entranced? Why is it that we spend so much time in appreciating that one
piece in the entire show? We say, "This painting strikes me", without
knowing fully why. Perhaps there has been a wordless association of a
memory which has made you relate to the same visual as the artist? This
response, when evoked, is my greatest reward as an artist. That's when I
know that I am successful.
This is me. And then there are some moments, associations and landmarks
which define and shape us over the years. This profile is an attempt to
outline some of these.”
Sajal Kanti Mitra
Sajal Kanti Mitra dwells in the twilight world of the figurative and the abstract. His visual designs speak of an interface between the two kinds of ideations, often indicating the potential of one emerging from within the other. An unmistakably urban visualiser, the fact of Mitra’s upbringing in Chandernagore may well have contributed to his ability to describe his ideas through a very personal idiom which has not been sullied by his academic training in Calcutta during the late Eighties. There is a touch of romanticism in his works, especially those relating to lone, pensive women.
Prakash Bhende
Prakash Bhende is from Goa.
Besides being a renowned Film Maker, He has also been a
chief designer with Textile companies like Gardens Textiles. And also
pioneered in Sun mica Designing in India.Prakash have organized many Art
shows Exhibitions in Renowned Art Galleries in India.Some of His
collections of paintings are selected by Indian government for displaying
in National Art Gallery in Delhi, India. Prakash specialize in
Fresco Style Paintings (oil on Canvas). Recently displayed a show on
Ancient Buddhist culture of Ajanta & Ellora Caves in Indian in which 32
exclusive Paintings were on display.