Two talented artists from Hyderabad show their work in Mumbai

Two recent shows at Mumbai based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke feature two young and talented artists, both from Hyderabad.

Artist Varunika Saraf presented large-scale watercolors on rice paper and cotton cloth, and a suite of intimate 7 x 7 inch square paintings on patterned fabric. Her paintings are like poetic visions in which the land and its people act as catalysts for her emotions and imagination.

Plucking some of her forms and figures from Indian miniature traditions, she opts to re-cast them into ever changing situations and mediums in narrative paintings, which assert their capacity for new adventures and journeys. The eccentric mix of her cast of characters: masked clowns, acrobats, actors, angels, soothsayers, skeletons, moonwalkers and a host of others, when collated in groups, often has an enduring frieze-like feel.

At other times they are reminiscent of the participants of an itinerant Jatra theatre or a traveling circus, captured as if mid-performance in the lingering spotlight of the ages. On the other hand, the latest show of artist Vinod Balak, entitled 'Venus Retrograde', involves works that draw on what he terms the ‘naive schema and European classical aesthetic norms’ as the hallmark of the ‘Kerala school of art’.

He quotes well known western masterpieces as well as Indian iconography apart from artistic convention and puts them on the same register of subversiveness. The artist assumes the stance located within a self consciously articulated ‘provincial modernism’, even as he views both the artistic canons with distance and critique. The paintings in themselves bear out description, for such is their intense narrative engagement.

However, as the principal actors in his formally laid out and highly defined compositions these are acts of mimesis. The animal forms are enacting a dialogue with what the artist likes to describe as a ‘fetish’ but that could also be read as a quotation, seeking to reposition the notions of value and beauty in art.