‘BLACK/white’ at Art Musings

Mumbai-based Art Musings earlier this month threw open to art lovers its new exhibition ‘BLACK/white’  with a group show featuring leading artists from the country. As part of it, following wonderful works are sure to dazzle you:

• Lalu Prasad Shaw’s still-lifes and portraits have a well-composed and smooth exterior. The artist draws inspiration from nature and the milieu surrounding the Bengali middle class. Ajay De works are easily identified by his trademark use of black, interspersed with bursts of red or blue.
  
• Laxma Goud displays early etchings, prints and watercolor works. The masterful small paintings of rural village life in a palette of monochrome grays give an interesting glimpse of village nostalgia, the surreal, and the erotic.
  
• Vaikuntam draws inspiration for his work from the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. Women are frequent subjects for his works. On the other hand, Raghava KK’s work conceptually grapples with the construct of identity, gender and sexuality, and the absence of interpersonal context in today's world of online identity performance.
  
• Images of Ganesha and Mother Teresa are recurring icons. Viveek Sharma’s paintings feature the daily grind of the middle-class Mumbaikar, where the artist figures as an integral part of the narrative - a silent observer of the event.
  
• Nandan Purkayastha’s works in black and white achieve depth and dimension. The fine spiral pattern drawing inter-relates all the elements in the painting giving it a unique complexity.
  
• The aura of science fiction surrounds Ajay Dhandre’s delightful, meticulously detailed paintings. The mechanisms and habitats that he conjures up are presented as jewel –like specimens in a museum of predictions.
  
• The imagery in Jayasri Burman's line drawings have a dream-like lyrical quality. A large painting depicting a pantheon of Hindu gods forms the central piece for this body of works, along with a set of smaller paintings in the same theme.
  
• Last but not the least, Paresh Maity’s landscapes of the ghats of Benaras, and the backwaters of Kerala to the canals of Venice form a suite of small works. A large canvas dominates this series depicting the gray monsoon.