‘The Body Unbound’ and ‘Índia - Lado a Lado’

Several talented artists from India through their thought provoking works explore key social and political issues like religious sectarianism, gender, sexuality, economic and class disparity as evident in a series of shows in the year gone by.

They now bring to the fore various enchanting facets of Indian culture and way of life, spanning a wide range of media and subject matter.

Right at the beginning of the year, a grand survey of Modernist Art from India, entitled ‘The Body Unbound’, took place at New York-based Rubin Museum of Art. The idea was to mystify representations of the figure and the bewildering body in modernist art from India. It included paintings from the early 1940s up to the mid-1980s that traced the development of Indian modernism, and celebrated the artistically productive dialogue between tradition and innovation.

The curators presented a comprehensive survey of how the modernist artists employed the human figure to express optimism, pain and anxiety, also trying to explore the country’s painting scene in the backdrop of its independence, the partition and the violence that followed. Meanwhile, a significant group show in Vietnam comprised exquisite figurative Indian paintings as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and India. It included prints of original canvases by some of the doyens like Amrita Shergil, Maqbool Fida Husain and FN Souza, among others.

‘Índia - Lado a Lado / Arte Contemporânea Indiana’ (India - Side by Side / Indian Contemporary Art) was part of a grand showcase courtesy the Ministry of Culture and Banco do Brasil in Brazil in mid-2012. It featured works by renowned artists like Baiju Parthan, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Gigi Scaria, Nalini Malani, Shilpa Gupta, Reena Kallat, Manjunath Kamath, Surekha, T.V. Santhosh, Vivek Vilasini and Riyas Komu. According to the curators, they denoted the density and dynamics of the country’s fascinating day-to-day by people belonging to different ethnic groups, religions and castes.