Kalakriti, Hyderabad and Gallery Beyond, Mumbai

Gallery Beyond:

Situated on 1700 sq feet in the premier art district of Kala Ghoda, South Mumbai, Gallery Beyond is a known name in the domain of art. The gallery primarily focuses on young, talented contemporary artists like Prakaash Chandwadkar, K.K. Muhammed, Datta Bansode, Anand Panchal,Prajakta Palav, Sanjeev Sonpimpare, Uday Mondal, Manish Chavda, to mention a few, among its success stories. The website notes:

“From auctions, shows, exhibitions and camps, to a virtual archive that spans the last 5000 years of Indian Art, we have only recently done the inevitable – established a Art Gallery of our own. Our Auction successes as curators and coordinators have been with Sotheby, Christies & Bowrings. We hold Art Camps/ Workshops at the Oberoi, Mumbai and Le Royal Meridien, Mumbai.”

The galley promoters have also done work on fundraisers for SAVE the Children, India, apart from raising funds for Tsunami Relief at National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai. Look forward to expand your knowledge and feel of art with Gallery Beyond at Art Expo India 2009.

Kalakriti:

True to its name, the gallery prorogates the finest of pieces of art. The gallery based in Hyderabad works with senior and young artists from different parts of India. Kalakriti has emerged as a resource for the recognized masters celebrated internationally and at home as much as for the young, upcoming artists. The Gallery has earned a reputation of promoting artists yet to receive wide-ranging applause.

Started in the year 2002, Kalakriti aims to promote Art & Culture in the Twin Cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. It has emerged as a professionally managed platform that promotes and supports Indian contemporary art. Kalakriti will showcase the best of works from talented contemporary artists.

‘Cults of Serendipity’ at Frey Norris

Jagannath Panda’s new series ‘Cults of Serendipity’ marks his debut in the US. The exhibition courtesy San Francisco-based Frey Norris presents works on paper, mixed media sculpture and paintings that incorporate various pastiched and patterned textiles – a sort of layered collage, evoking new cities constructed on ghost cities, as if a whole new civilization superimposed on top of previous ones.

His art largely focuses on serendipitous moments coupled with juxtaposed locations. In some ways, it reflects his observations of Gurgaon. In this fast-developing suburb of the capital city of India, new housing structures and air-conditioned shopping malls often overrun the ancient.

Here the ecosystem has little chance to keep pace, much less the networks for electricity and plumbing. Curator and gallerist Peter Nagy mentions that his mix of the mythological and the realistic points to the disoriented nature of Indian identity today, as it hopes to synthesize the traditional and the contemporary, the indigenous and the international, the imaginary and the actual.

An accompanying note elaborates: “A pair of figures from antiquity seem modestly bound in love-making among floating foliage in the upper right corner of one of Jagannath Panda’s newest mixed media paintings; the rest of the canvas appears to be a remembrance and excavation of this pair of lovers, depicted as in a Kama Sutra illustration, but also a broad play on scale, toying with archeology and construction sites. In the modernity of the backhoes, there is a personal and cultural exploration of human history, both recorded and earlier. It is a bittersweet vision for the frenetic development of the quintessential Indian metropolis.”

Born in Bhubaneswar in 1970, he did his BFA in sculpture from the BK College of Arts & Crafts, Bhubaneswar and his MFA in sculpture from the MS University, Baroda. Later he studied at the Fukuoka University of Japan and the Royal College of Art in London. His artworks were recently showcased at Nature Morte in New Delhi and Berlin, Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai, and Alexia Goethe Gallery in London.

The artist has featured in prestigious group shows such as ‘Indian Highway IV’ at the Lyons Museum of Contemporary Art, France’; ‘Indian Highway V’ at the MAXXI Museum in Rome; ‘Transformation’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; ‘Chalo! India’ at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; ‘Where in the World’ at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon; and ‘Midnight’s Children’ at Studio la Citta in Verona, Italy, among others.

Key moments of a renowned sculptor's illustrious career

Earthy and dynamic in nature, while exhibiting a tendency of surging movement or growth, his path-breaking sculptures received acclaim not only in India, but also internationally. Ramkinkar Baij opted to break away from the formal celebratory styles prevalent in British India and set a new precedent as a painter and sculptor.

Ramkinkar Baij deftly integrated different enchanting elements of Santhal tribal art and the way of life into his work, to enhance them by an acute understanding of prevalent Western expressionism. This sense of rhythm his sculptural works are noted for brilliantly manifested in his watercolors as well. Fluidity of the medium lent itself to his superb style reflected in his works done in the Kalighat tradition eclectically interconnected with Cubism.

The captivating combination led to a peculiarly personal idiom - unprompted and bold – a trademark of both his paintings and sculpture. He reveled in the remoteness and silence of Santiniketan and reflected the serene vibrancy of local life – tribal celebrations, marriages, and women threshing paddy. Though his experience and upbringing as an artist was totally Indian, he did understand international art, as reflected in his evocative and colorful watercolors and his sculptures that portrayed local life.

Apart from a series of solo shows and group exhibitions in which his wonderful works were featured from the early 1940’s, among his major posthumous exhibits are 'A Retrospective' at Lalit Kala Akademi (2012); 'Indian Art Through the Lens of History, Indigo Blue Art, Singapore (2011); ‘Manifestations', Delhi Art Gallery (2011, 08, 05, 04, 03), New Delhi; 'Time Unfolded', KNMA, Delhi (2011); 'Moderns', Royal Cultural Centre, Amman (2008); and 'Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture', courtesy Bodhi Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2008), among others.

A recipient of Padma Bhushan from the Government of India (1970), he won Deshi Uttam Award (1977) and Doctor of Letters Award (1979) from Viswa Bharti, Santiniketan. The Nepalese government had invited him to create Buddhist Sculptures in 1945.

Ideas to launch your art career

Here are some useful tips to ‘start and develop career or successfully launch yourself as an artist in today's competitive scenario:

1. Specify your end goals and plan of action. Be clear about what exactly you want your work to achieve. There are different types of communities that support the artists and there are ways to support your own artwork available than ever before - offline and online.

2. Keep your thought process simple in order to maximize your creative output in the studio! This is a sincere, life and art-affirming action you must undertake or else you might end up isolating yourself and burning out. Continuously check out if you are still learning and growing; constantly evaluate whether your life/work is moving in the proper direction.

3. Teaching can add another crucial dimension to one’s work as it can inspire and feed creative faculties. Watching students grow is a gratifying experience. So the experts recommend that artists should consider teaching to looking to sustain their studio practice.

4. Expand your network and build your public profile. An effective networking strategy they recommend is employing one’s alma mater to access the alumni networks, social media connections like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc, seminars and other special events for reaching out to people and building knowledge about the field. It’s an effective way of building your public profile and expanding your network.

5. Mentors are equally critical for success. Immerse yourself into a reliable network of mentors, family, colleagues, and friends. Schedule an occasional studio visit, or an informal meeting to keep yourself updated.

6. View other works of art that appear similar to that of your own. Compare prices offline and online. Galleries would generally add their fixed commission amount to that you seek instead of cutting into your wholesale price. Check specific details in this regard. Consult a reputed arts alliance for contract help. If required, have a written agreement or contract, reviewed by a legal expert.

Bernardo Paz’s proud possessions

About thousand employees swarm around Bernardo Paz’s contemporary-art complex Inhotim nestled in the picturesque hills of southeast Brazil, away from Brazil’s mainstream collecting scenes in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Globetrotting art aficionados soak into the beauty of almost 500 stunning works like ‘Sonic Pavilion’ by Doug Aitken that employs high-sensitivity microphones put in a 633-foot hole to spread the bass murmur of Earth’s deft inner depths.

His botanical garden has over 1,400 species of palm trees, apart from other rare plants such as the titun arum from Sumatra. Sprawling over nearly 5,000 acres, it has room for 2,000 more artworks, at least. The 61-year-old lanky, mining magnate whispers are barely audible. A high school dropout, his first work experience was at a gas filling station run by his father.

Later he worked at stock exchange before taking up mining and erecting a business empire that finances operations of Inhotim (pronounced in-yo-TCHEEM) to the tune of about $60- $70 million each year. Certain masterpieces from Brazil’s boom time still survive, testifying past extravagance.

There are some private collections of contemporary-art elsewhere in Latin America accessible to the public, but none really has Inhotim’s exuberance. Curators and art historians marvel at the chaotic vision and sheer scale of Mr. Paz’s collection that devotes elaborate space to major artist projects. No surprise, Inhotim receives millions of visitors every year. In order to make it self-sustaining, the visionary collector intends to build hotels for visitors, a grand amphitheater, and even a ‘lofts’ complex for those keen to ‘live amid the collection’.

For now, he is more concerned with drawing the masses to works such as ‘Restore Now’ by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, in which texts by philosophers like Deleuze and Jacques Derrida are interspersed with eerie images of mutilated bodies. He quips, “There are works here that I haven’t entered yet, which everyone said were spectacular, but then why should I go in there? I don’t really consider myself that passionate for art. But gardens, that’s more what I like.”

A search for self and concern for ultimate truth

Jagannath Mohapatra, Rahul Chowdhury and Suryakant Lokhande are considered among the most talented and brightest young painters from India. Institute of Contemporary Indian Art (ICIA) showcased their works at Art Expo India 2009, which drew spontaneous response from art lovers. The idea was to provide a glimpse into a diverse range of works by the three most noteworthy names on the horizon of contemporary Indian art done.

Here, we sum up their themes, styles, and thought processes to grasp the diversity of their art practice. First and foremost, Suryakant Lokhande’s visual tempests emerged from the boundless energy of gestures and movements, the unceasing vitality of India’s everyday domestic decor, whereby his efforts altered the image from its fantastic lifeblood and its libidinal power, its exciting colors and scenes of collective drama to a deep disturbing image of uncertainty that is part of all our lives.

A search for self coupled with acute concerns regarding the ultimate truth drive his artistic processes. His creations are based on digitally enhanced photographs, which he opts to paint over with automobile paint. “For me, a photograph is a tool to look into myself”, he explains. His paintings are a crucible - a site of transformation, a place where objects, lines, colors, and forms go through a creative catharsis and are then transmuted in order to experience a tempest of personal and social impulses.

This alchemy produced labyrinthal images filled with dreamlike flashes that absorb the flow of figures and representations - some of them cruel and tragic, based on past and present phases of his life and images that have touched and shocked him. His series ‘The War is Over’ slams the uncertain situations post-war, and refer to the predicament of a sensitive artist trying to push boundaries.

An artist who surveys the core of human existence

An upcoming and talented artist from India, Prasanta Sahu, marries two opposing ideas: the unique brushstroke and the reproduced image. He is acutely aware of the pictorial surface of the canvas. In them, monochromatic pictures are calculatively and captivatingly contrasted with vividly painted areas and apparent abrasions on the canvas create tempting textural motifs.

However, his work consciously looks to move away from the high-modernist obsession with the painted surface’s formal properties. He essentially strives to fathom complex relationship and transformations occurring between the self and the world as he perceives it. His paintings act as a mapping and surveying of the human existence.

For Prasanta Sahu, the human body is the most familiar two-dimensional image for expressing latent feelings. Acutely aware of the cultural environs and socio-economic climate, mindless violence and brutality arouse a sense of strong vehemence and protest in him that he expresses in his art. It’s one of the most important aspects of his practice.

He elaborates in an interview: “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, converting it into a floating mass of strokes. In the process the animated quality of the human body gets transformed into a dead, inanimate surface. To my mind this is representative of the ‘arranged’ second hand violence we confront every day via the media, viewed clinically from the comforts of our known space.”

At every level of his curious and equally meticulous working process, there tends to be a constant interplay of opposites. The image is painted in a painstaking manner using the paint-brush technique - both tedious and time consuming - yet, he deliberately aims to erase any apparent signs of human intervention in the final output.

The artist essentially tries to build a feel of tension, a sort of pull between two opposing elements – those of manual rendering and mechanical reproduction. Thus the work creates an element of doubt in the viewers’ mind, whether what they are looking at, is a painting, or a reproduction on the canvas.