Prasanta Sahu’s art practice

Prasanta Sahu as an artist has always tried to investigate relationships and transformations between the self and the world as he perceives it, through his paintings. It’s a survey into the human existence, with his own body serving as the most simplest and complex of subjects.

He reveals: “For me the human body is the most familiar two dimensional image by which I can express unspoken feelings, pain etc. It is an important part of my art making to be aware of the cultural environs and socio-economic climate. As an artist brutality, mindless violence, carnage arouses in me strong vehemence and protest; as to how this is expressed in art is a highly personal choice.”

His paintings often seem like mechanical reproductions. According to him, at every level in his working process, there’s a constant play between opposites. The image is painted very painstakingly using paint-brush technique which is time-consuming. Yet, he deliberately aims to erase any sign of human touch in the final painting.

The artist tries to create a tension, a pull between two opposite factors- that of mechanical reproduction and manual rendering.. In his recent series ‘human skin’ was in focus. He stated: “We are all quite familiar with the human preoccupation with skin, and its connection to obsessions with youth, beauty, age and race. The underlying socio-political issues are universal and yet very personal. Metaphorically it is a disguise, a skin glove, a mask.

"The studio is the Operation Theatre where I cut, treat, arrange & re-arrange images of human skins & human figures. A tiny square inch of human skin is enlarged multiple times, transforming it a floating mass of strokes. In the process the animated quality of the human body is transformed into a dead, inanimate surface. “

As Prasanta Sahu puts it, this is representative of the “arranged” second hand violence which we confront every day via the media, viewed clinically from the comforts of our known space.

Striving to raise art awareness quotient

Flow is an art initiative that works across the twin domains of education and culture. It looks to create exciting learning experiences for people of all ages. Flow was formed in 2006 of a passion to improve the engagement between cultural heritage, science and arts organisations and the public audiences that they serve.

Run by Bridget McKenzie, former Head of Learning at the British Library, and her colleague Mark Stevenson, all its work is based on the belief that ‘we are all lifelong learners, and that learning experiences must be rich and contextualized in order to be meaningful. For more about our method of creative and cultural learning.’

In 2010, Flow opened an office in Delhi to provide an array of interventions to ensure academic enrichment on basis of its Creative & Cultural Learning model. Though it has consulted internationally in countries like Russia and the US, the Delhi branch is its first ever international outpost.

Eliza Hilton, an educator and Katherine Rose, a museologist are the two directors of Flow Associates in India. When the two first visited museums and heritage sites in India a few years ago, they were surprised by what they saw or did not see - families in museums or even children. When they visited Ajanta-Ellora caves, the two were distressed by the fact that children were treating it as a place for picnic.

This is what Flow wants to set right. It goes by an educational philosophy in which learning interventions collate the capacities of individuals with a wider range of cultural resources like art, objects and the built environment. Its approach builds on a theory in which learning is very optimal. It strives to raise art awareness quotient through informal means.

The moderators look to evaluate how the various tools of art appreciation actually help children. Right now, Flow India is operating at the ground level, holding workshops for them. “By the time a workshop ends, the children develop the critical ability for recognizing colors and styles associated with an era or artist like Jackson Pollock or Amrita Sher-Gil,” Rose reveals.

Eliciting notions of identity through art

Primarily a figurative painter, Théodore Mesquita’s creations strive to elicit notions of identity constructed through specific representations of symbols, signs and the body in art. For him, signs and symbols manifest themselves, in a state of cultural pluralism, wherein the archetypal figuration is reflected, recognised and regained, through the environs of the imagined and real.

The images contained in his painting are soaked deep in faith, in the art and covenant of picture making, rooted in continuum, of the human, the singular, the communal, the one, the many; in the presence of its histories, in the presence of our lives.

His work records body culture, and its corroboration within the articulation of signs and symbols. It delves into the archetypal recognition of a broad psychological landscape, redefining the pluralistic cultures, which connect and discern the existence of the times and space of our lives, those having definite sounds and visions, pregnant with supernal meaning.

Elaborating on his artistic processes, the artist says, “In the foundation of my artistic endeavour, I have been consumed with the primal urge….to deliver and to sustain my expression, to achieve contemporary articulation, innovation, exploration and reflection - in the extended frame of time and space.”

Signs and symbols for him offer infinite possibilities to explore the inherent associations present in the animate and inanimate subjects of contention and thereby forms of expression and understanding, as the artist believes they cut across the worldwide cultural divide of confusion and acrimony – arriving and contributing into a profound and perceptive communion.

“As I evolve continuously from the meditative experiences that evoke my creativity…” the artist reveals, “I am beckoned into the realms of the absent navigator, who guides the motions of perception…The extinct traditions, that shelters the stream of consciousness…The recalled gesture, that defines the repository of images…The voice of the prophet, which sustains the cannons of manifestation…The rites of fertility, that invigorates the spirit of realization…All this and more as I rethread the motifs of birth and incantation, life and confinement, death and bewitchment…”

Findings of the Art Market Confidence Survey

The latest Indian Art Market Confidence Survey released by the art market research agency, ArtTactic, (Researchers: Anders Petterson and Nathan Engelbrecht) offers some interesting insights. Some of them are listed below:

•Most experts feel the Indian art market will need at least a couple more years to find its feet again and recover. The overall Confidence Indicator for it is down marginally from October 2011 (by just 2 percent). The confidence in the economy has gone up to 45 percent from 28 percent, off-setting a 9 percent fall in confidence levels for the Modern art market, and a 24 percent fall for the Contemporary Indian art market.

•In spite of the slightly negative market trend, experts are positive about the near-term future of Indian Modern art market (the next 6 months). The round of auctions in March 2012 for Indian was rather disappointing, as the Modern & Contemporary art market witnessed another season of decline, touching a total sales volume worth $10,438,532, down 27 percent lower than March 2011 and 9 percent from September 2011.

•The art market has experienced a steady fall in the last 20 months as far as India is concerned. Current sales volume are more than 60 percent lower than June 2010. In comparison to a period 6 months ago, the survey respondents are getting more nervous and negative about the market. The latest Indicator is at 45, down from 55 (-18%) in October 2011.

•The short-term outlook, as gauged by the Expectation Indicator is at 58 (up from earlier 50). It implies that the experts are a bit more positive about the coming 6 months period in comparison to the current situation. The hesitance is also apparent when one considers what the experts are thinking the Indian art market direction will be in the coming 6 months.

•About 30 percent of the experts feel the For the Modern Indian market will go up (34 percent in October 2011), and nearly 70 percent feel it will remain flat (66 percent in October 2011). In fact, an immediate recovery appears to be some distance away, with close to 50 percent of the experts believing the Modern Indian market will need two more years at least before a broader recovery will happen.

•Among the artist covered in this report are Subodh Gupta, Maqbool Fida Husain , Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, K.G. Subramanyan, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna, Himmat Shah, Arpita Singh, Zarina Hashmi, Jogen Chowdhury, Rameshwar Broota, Ravinder Reddy, and Rashid Rana.

Motivations and inspiration of artist N. S. Harsha

Renowned artist N. S. Harsha has turned the ancient miniature painting tradition into a contemporary form, which lets him fuse the specific with the universal. The figures floating in his sly and playful painterly realm, invariably focused on an event, will point to something odd, incongruous or absurd. The wit lies as much in the grand scale of the delicate depictions as also in the telling detail of the vignette.

Akin to a clever chronicler, he refers from popular stories and peculiar perceptions of news events. He meticulously portrays small town/city life in an increasingly globalized world, by juxtaposing seemingly disassociated local images within an international spectrum. To put it in his words, 'I continue to search for a way in which to portray large crowds or gatherings and their collective absurd acts. It is interesting to observe a crowd which has lost its collective rationale - or its attempt to achieve a collective rationale!'” 

The artist invests his works with acute n awareness of the medium, wherein the figures turn into an audience for a presupposed viewer, who then becomes complicit with or somehow activates that incident depicted. In honoring him with the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize in 2008, the jury members mentioned of his vast scope of work, its range and diversity such as painting, installation and even community activities. Among the largest art awards internationally, it recognizes outstanding emerging practitioners, who refer the human condition. 

He artist draws his motifs from a spate of news-driven images and traditional symbols to concoct a pointed socio-political commentary. He portrays ironies of small town/city life in an increasingly globalized world. His multi-dimensional oeuvre includes semi-abstractionist panels, detailed figurative painting, large scale installations, miniature drawing, and cross-disciplinary, research-based collaborations.

His multi-layered narratives suggest how the global is invariably located and sub-consciously seeped within the local imagination. The sensitive practitioner continues to draw on both traditional narratives and popular culture, deftly interweaving international and local points of reference in his diverse art forms.

Kaleidoscopic view of a veteran artist's enticing landscapes

A recent joint show, entitled ‘Eternal Landscapes‘ at Mumbai's ICIA brought together two diverse landscape painters Ram Kumar from the pre-independence generation, one of the pioneers of the modern art movement in India, and Paresh Maity from the post-independence generation, a young turk of the contemporary art movement in India. Revealing the true spirit and essence of Ram Kumar’s works, an essay by renowned art expert, collector and gallerist Vickram Sethi had underlined the following aspects of his rich art practice:

• Ram Kumar’s paintings are inspired by the natural environment in its many manifestations, wilderness, mountains, ravines, crevices, rifts, fissures, gorges, canyons, hillsides, forests, deserts, fields and rivers. Ram Kumar modifies them to a point of making them unrecognizable. His works cover a wide spectrum of possibilities often based on emotional response to a natural setting rather than a specific depiction of a place.
• His journey as a painter is an evolution from objective memory to subjective tension, from images which memorialize nature to abstraction in which nature has become a sum of surreal parts that almost missed becoming a cohesive whole. His works are charged with a seductive energy, the painterly gestures at once vehement, agitated and autonomous and yet the structure holds - there is a kind of a framework creating a sense of fixed and absolute space, the gestures at times becoming more forceful, threatening to shatter it.
• His abstractions are a precarious balance of abrupt explosions of uncontainable gestural energy and soothing stabilizing structure which seems to transcend the painterly marks that constitute it. His landscapes manage this doubleness with deceptive ease, this simultaneous sense of equilibrium and disequilibrium in which the landscapes seem a sum of disequilibrated parts that do not add up to a whole and organically equilibrated whole that is more than the sum of any of its details.
• Ram Kumar’s understanding and development of a visual language through abstraction encourages us to explore in our minds eye a landscape of transcendent physical beauty and creative potency. The artist’s process and evolution affirms the relevance of landscapes in contemporary art practice and leads us to a deeper understanding of nature and a powerful reminder of our own connection with the earth.

Internet propels art sales

India has been a witness to the phenomenon of selling art online for close to a decade now, especially since Saffronart was formed at the beginning of the new millennium. It is well established as India’s premier online auction house. Many others like Asta Guru have followed suit in the last few years, to prove the credentials of Web-based resources in the domain of art.

In an interview with ARTINFO, the co-founder of Saffronart, Dinesh Vazirani, had stated that the company was launched with the premise of blending technology and the art so as to let people have ready reference points - images, prices, information etc in order to make the entire process of buying works online easier.

Complimenting this outreach to new audience base online is the trend of rising internet usage thanks to wider access. A report by the Boston Consulting Group last year had mentioned of a sharp increase in internet usage in countries like Indonesia, Russia, Brazil and India, raising the total number of users to more than 1 billion by 2015.

As more people are keen to view and buy art online, auction houses are looking to leverage the power and reach of the medium. In fact, roughly 30% of Christie’s International clients now bid online. The VIP Art Fair hosted earlier this year was the first of its kind. On the other hand, India Art Collective, an exclusive online fair, was recently held to serve as an open platform accessible to a wide audience.

It was projected as a cost-efficient option to the traditional art fairs. The Chemould Prescott Road, Nature Morte, The Guild, Experimenter Gallery SKE, Sakshi Gallery, Apparao Galleries, Akar Prakar, Vadehra Art, Palette, Latitude 28, Tao, and Kashi were among the major galleries that featured in the inaugural edition, underling the importance of Internet to push art sales.

Given the country’s size and diversity, it’s not at all surprising that vendors are resorting to online channels to access markets beyond Mumbai and Delhi. The ability to target buyers is also greatly facilitated by a fast-expanding affluent class with a higher purchasing capacity, apart from the buyers of Indian origin (primarily, the Indian Diaspora).