A Kalighat paintings traveling showcase courtesy London’s V&A

A collaborative exhibition series courtesy the London-based Victoria and Albert Museum and Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya has just been concluded. V&A boasts a vast collection of Kalighat paintings, including contemporary works by rural artists, specially acquired for the project.

A group of artists from Kolkata’s traditional patua and other artisan communities evolved this form during the mid 19th century. By making use of brush and ink from the lampblack, they painted fascinating figures of deities, ordinary people, and the newly rich on mill-made paper. They also portrayed the changing gender roles and romantic depictions of women with vigorously flowing lines.

The patuas, collectively working on a painting, mostly remained anonymous. There were no signatures on the paintings to reveal their identities. The V&A collection though, includes works from the 1890s and 1900s that can be traced to Nibaran Chandra and Kali Charan Ghosh. The project charts the development of this exquisite form from early watercolor paintings of simple figures on a plain background, through to more complex designs that demonstrate the European influence on the city.

The World Collections Program, a project envisaged to link major UK museums with other institutions in Africa and Asia, had had its monetary support through government funding cut. So any such future projects will need to focus on resources from wealthy nations like China or the Gulf. Private funding, to an extent filled the gap, materializing an Indian tour of captivating Kalighat paintings from the V&A collection. The next leg of this showcase is due to be hosted at the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad.

Even as the country’s traditional art forms remain in spotlight, modern and contemporary Indian art continues to draw attention as well. A show of abstract works, entitled ‘Between Fragments’, takes place at Indigo Blue Art, Singapore.

Shoba Broota, S.H Raza, Prafulla Mohanty, S. Harshavardhana, Ganesh Haloi, Paramjit Singh, Akkitham Narayanan, Manisha Parekh, Nitish Bhattacharjee, Ram Kumar, G.R Santosh, Samit Das, and Partha Shaw are among the artists on view, who employ abstraction to convey the profound depths of life, art, spirituality and emotion.