Sunday, April 14, 2013

Life and of Manisha Gera Baswani

Having done her post graduation (Fine Arts) from the Jamia Millia Islamia University, Manisha Gera Baswani later studied in Paris on the French Government Scholarship. A National Scholarship recipient for young emerging artists, she also secured Junior Fellowship. Between 1994 and 96, she worked as a Senior Artist at IGNCA (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts) for a Multi-Media project under the supervision of Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan on Jayadeva’s 13th century poem, Gita Govinda. The project was hosted at some prominent museums around the world.

About four years ago, the artist was instrumental in launching a creative hub in New Delhi, called ‘Manthan. It envisioned a periodical event that would focus on bringing together professionals across diverse creative fields to share their ‘process and methodology’ so as to initiate a cross-cultural dialogue in.

She has also been photographing fellow artists in their creative spaces now for 9 years .Her project artists through the lens was shown by Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, during the concluded India Art Fair in 2012. Apart from a solo exhibition at Gallery Espace, New Delhi in 2012, she has shown her work at Palette Art Gallery, Delhi (2007) and Gallery Chemould, Mumbai (2005) to name a few.

The act of painting for her is a 360 degree exercise, allowing for meditative time, a structured discipline and immense personal gratification. She loves to explore different scales and mediums. After painting in the miniature format for a while, she has also worked on large scale canvases. Her oeuvre encompasses gouache and watercolors, oils and dry pastels that render themselves to different textures and sensibilities. She is more concerned with the deeper spiritual reality than the mundane existence of things. In the process, there is a range of worlds she creates. Her experiences are episodical – threaded together by a language, personalized through memories, beliefs and values.

In a series of works hosted at Gallery Espace in 2012, she took the viewer through one curious chapter of her life wherein she was seen juggling between the roles of a professional (artist) and a homemaker. They offered a peep into her life as an artist, wife, mother and homemaker.

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