Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain

‘Radical Terrain’, a new exhibition focusing on Modernist Art from India has just opened at Rubin Museum of Art. It’s the third exhibition taking place in the much acclaimed series on art from India that highlights meticulous exploration of its art landscape for the generation especially after independence. What are the other highlights of the show? Let us take a quick look:

Landscape is the theme

The exhibition features new work by international contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds currently working in and identifying with landscape. This is both a response to the modernist paintings on view and to work towards a nuanced conceptual understanding of what ‘landscape’ in art is. The modernist paintings in the exhibition suggests that landscape became a recognizable form of expression in this period as a means for artists to come to terms with the vastness and diversity of India as a newly sovereign nation.

Explorations of landscape – especially rural landscapes-- by painters inadvertently paralleled official initiatives of government organizations like the Films Division of India, which commissioned many films of rural and distant regions like Orissa and Himachal Pradesh for a primary audience of citizens in urban centers. These activities reflect a country creating a new identity.

Highlighting contemporary interventions

‘Radical Terrain’ shows the great variety of landscapes created by artists in India after independence from British rule – including figural and abstract landscapes, specific sites and conceptual landscapes painted in a wide range of styles and from many social, political, and formal perspectives.

The contemporary interventions in the exhibition will be in various modes and media, reflecting the diversity of what landscape means to contemporary artists of various backgrounds. The artists include Lisi Raskin, Marc Handelman, Seher Shah, Janaina Tschäpe, and others.

The show curated by Beth Citron, entitled ‘Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain’, continues at the museum based in New York until April 29, 2013.