‘The Path of the Lotus: Indian Art’

This is a collection of works courtesy Grosvenor Vadhera as part of Asian Art week in London. The artists include F.N Souza, M.F Husain, S.H Raza, A Ramachandran, Manjit Bawa, Arpita Singh, Dhruva Mistry, Rashid Rana, Faiza Butt and Olivia Fraser.

Like other great artists of the Twentieth Century, Souza was neither daunted by tradition nor disparaging of contemporary visual culture. Instead he adopted various notions and visual references from such sources as the old masters, his contemporaries, and commercial imagery appropriating them to create his own distinct works.

Husain’s predilection for mythological subject matter meant that for the most part he had been a narrative painter. From the reflective mood of Nude Women Abstract to the energy and terror of Wounds, it is clear that Husain had a masterful grip on the pictorial elements of line, color and form.

Dhruva Mistry’s work ranges from huge public installations to maquettes and wall reliefs. His works not only encompass influences from the Egyptian and the Cycladic art, the European traditions of figurative sculpture but also from Hinduism and Buddhism. Apart from being conceptual, it also engage with the process of art-making, while alluding to the intellectual debate between the artist and viewer.

Paris-based S H Raza has created his own text for modernism through his large repertoire of symbols, color tonalities and extended spaces. Images from nature and specifically the forests of Madhya Pradesh retained a prominent place in his mind long after he left India in 1950. He maintained an intense and powerful bond with the forests, rivers and parched earth of India.

Arpita Singh literally ‘builds up’ the painted surface, with the same patient faculty both in oil and watercolor. The surface tension created by the short, overlapping patches of pigments and tones is often transmitted to the surreal surprise which arise out of the continuous synchronicity of domestic objects and lower vase and aeroplane, guns, soldiers and killers hidden behind bushes in a park and men and women oblivious of corpses strewn around. She thinks with her paintings.

Apart from the works by above artists, there is an array of sculptures from the ancient era plus miniatures from the SEITZ Collection on view.

(Information courtesy: Grosvenor Vadhera)