‘Painting Redux’ at Talwar Gallery

Talwar Gallery presents ‘Painting Redux’, a solo exhibition of works by Allan deSouza at its Delhi premises. Through the appropriation of iconic paintings, and his virtual, painterly process, he traverses past and present, exploring collective and individual encounters with Western art history and canonical Western artists.

The familiar, figurative sources of the works, through the process of his overlaying are submerged in dense, mostly monochromatic palettes, subtly re-emerging on the surface in residual traces and flecks of color.

In the Redactions series, paintings by Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin have been redacted and reworked, where the color is extracted from the furthest point of the painting–usually the horizon–is brought forth to envelope the surface, obscuring the original image. While the works in ‘Third Eye’ emerge from self-portraits of major Western artists, undergoing a painterly retransformation with the dominant color in each portrait selected from the site of the proverbial ‘third eye’.

There is a heightened responsiveness in this body of work; from the seeming tactility of the medium, the variety of marks on the surface, texture in the translucency of erasure and simultaneous over laying seen in the most varied notations – from the lightness, the density and the sheer luminosity of color. Hovering between figuration and abstraction, subjectivity and neutrality, the real and the fictional, Allan deSouza’s works excavate historical, cultural, and ideological constructs, examining the relationship between narratives of collective identity, individual experience and art history.

Allan deSouza was born in Kenya of Indian parents and currently resides in California where he is a Professor at The San Francisco Art Institute. deSouza’s works have recently been on view in solo exhibitions at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2011); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2011); and The Krannert Museum, Champaign, IL (2010). Recently deSouza was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation’s residency program at the Bellagio Center at Lake Como, Italy.

His works have also been featured in exhibitions and institutions worldwide including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); 3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale Seoul, South Korea (2008); The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA (2007); International Center of Photography (ICP), New York (2006); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA (2004); Museum of African Art, New York, NY (2003); and The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York, NY.

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde

Combining rebellion, beauty, scientific precision and imaginative grandeur, the Pre-Raphaelites constitute Britain’s first modern art movement. A new exhibition at Tate Britain brings together over 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre.

Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) rebelled against the art establishment of the mid-nineteenth century, taking inspiration from early Renaissance painting. The exhibition establishes the PRB as an early example of the avant-garde: painters who self-consciously overturned orthodoxy and established a new benchmark for modern painting and design.

It includes many famous Pre-Raphaelite works, and will also re-introduce some rarely seen masterpieces including Ford Madox Brown’s polemical Work 1852–65 and the 1858 wardrobe designed by Philip Webb and painted by Edward Burne-Jones on the theme of ‘The Prioress’s Tale’. An article by Alastair Smart in The UK Telegraph notes: “Drawing heavily for subject matter on Dante, Malory and other medieval tales, it’s common to pigeonhole Pre-Raph art simply as escapism from the travails of Victorian living.

"Occasionally, though, it offered hard-hitting social chronicle: Henry Wallis’s exhausted, exploited Stonebreaker, say. The movement’s many biblical scenes, in turn, were reflective of the complex religious reality of the mid 19th century. The established Anglican Church was growing unsettled by factions from within (Evangelical, Tractarian, Broad) as well as by a resurgent Catholicism from without – with particular issue over the material paraphernalia of worship. It was amid these debates that the Pre-Raphaelites set out to revive a Christian art tradition that had been wiped out in Britain in the Reformation.

"Often their approach was typological, with symbol-laden works like Rosetti’s Girlhood of Virgin Mary (complete with lily, vine, dove, lamp etc) intended to ensure spiritual meaning be decoded bit by bit, rather than revealed in one fell High-Renaissance swoop. Where the show really excels is in its erudite look at the historical backdrop of Victorian England, the writer concludes.

Fusing sculpture and installation

First Museum solo of internationally renowned artist Ranjani Shettar takes place in India. Dr.Bhau Daji Lad Museum showcases her series, entitled ‘High Tide for a Blue Moon’. It’s also her first ever exhibition in the city of Mumbai. Over half the artworks exhibited are on view for first time in the country, including major new artworks done over the last two years. Here’s a quick look at her artistic thought process and career:

• The artist's usage of traditional and modern crafts to sculpt natural and industrial materials accentuates the tenuous relationship between industry and nature. She resolves this by uncovering the beauty within their co existence and in the collaboration between man and nature.
  
• In creating environments with sculpture and installation, she fuses the two realms together with dynamic yet graceful forms and textures, revealing the spectacle and magnanimity of natural phenomena. Seduced by their simplicity and openness, our experience of her works yields humility and a surrender to their splendor. Her materials yield to unfamiliar realizations.
  
• The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne had launched its new contemporary art space with an exhibition of work by her late last year. In ‘Dewdrops and Sunshine’, she showcased her unique approach to sculpture, comprising material experimentation, engagement with nature, relationship to space, and exploration of tradition coupled with resonance with modernism.
  
• An accompanying note stated: “She often transforms natural phenomena into mystical and magical forms, to create sculptures clearly informed by a material openness, which borrows from rich Indian craft traditions filtered through her own sensibility.
  
• Explaining her thought process, the artist quips, “There’s an element of chance in the way you see the sculpture, specifically in terms of how it manages to position itself in space according to movement of air in the space.”
• Ranjani Shettar’s work has been on view in numerous significant institutions and exhibitions worldwide. It can currently be seen at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY in On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century. Her recent prominent solos have been held at prestigious venues like The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009), The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (2008-09) and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2008).
• Other prominent participations include 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2010); 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2008), 9th Lyon Biennial, France (2007), 8th Sharjah Biennale (2007), and 15th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006).

‘Cynical Love: Life in the Everyday’

Conceptualized by guest curator Gayatri Sinha, an interesting group show at New Delhi-based KNMA strives to signal the place of technology in a massive global change in the flow and reception of information.

A curatorial note elaborates: “It is technology that serves democratic art forms, from social messaging to YouTube to serving micro banking in women’s cooperatives in India and Bangladesh. As an instrument of democracy, technology effects twitter revolutions and Facebook fame. At the same time, technology challenges the museum as it constructs an archive, leading the past into the future. Technology as the driver of invention challenges the aura that art confers on an object.

“Responding to the space based in a technology hub, artists have revisited industrialization from the 19th century to the present day with wit, irony and critique. The many stages of invention that signal modernity here intersect with contemporary views of design, architecture and film. The art works invoke a sensory response to the environment, a return to tactility and natural materials. Cynicism is tempered with nostalgia and the poetics of a vanishing beauty.”

The exhibit is in sync with the growing permanent Collection of KNMA largely focused on significant trajectories of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art. Its core Collection highlights a magnificent generation of 20th century Indian painters from the post-Independent decades and equally engages the disparate art practice of the younger contemporaries. To put it in Kiran Nadar’s words, ‘though the idea of opening a private art museum occurred with the intention of sharing my art collection with the larger public, I was also acutely aware of the existing dearth of institutional spaces that could bring visibility to modern and contemporary art from India and the subcontinent”.

Sponsored by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA is plugging the social need of promoting art and instilling its deep appreciation amongst individuals, through the museum and its other educational initiatives. It is focused on bridging the current disconnect between art and the public and enhancing museum-going culture in India. 

‘The Play of Life’

Creativity is something, which can be unveiled and expressed in multiple of ways. A new exhibit of sculptures by Ankit Patel, entitled ‘The Play of Life’ at Chawla Art Gallery in New Delhi is an apt example of this. It has on view beautiful sculptures in bronze that sure will leave you mesmerized. Here's a quick look at the artist's journey and his works:

• Ankit Patel received his formal training in sculpture from the M.S. University, Baroda in 1983. For last more than two decades, he has participated in several exhibitions in India and abroad. He is a recipient of many prestigious awards like the National Lalit Kala Akademi Award, Delhi (1995); All India art Exhibition Award, Jaipur in 1993; and Rajasthan State Lalit Kala Akademi Award (1989, 1991, 1995).
• His most prestigious group exhibition was sponsored by Societe Nationale Des Beaux-Arts at Carrousel Du Louvre, Paris, 2010. The artist is also known to specialize in designing of prestigious metal trophies. He has done several outdoor projects including a series of bronzes for a park in Jaipur.
• Ankit Patel works on his lovely sculptural forms, endowing them with a fresh breath of fresh life. The inspiration mostly comes from his rustic roots, folk and farm traditions. Movement is the force and the thrust behind much of his mobile and kinetic creations that he diligently sculpts working relentlessly from his studio.
• Apart from bronze, he has also worked in wood, bronze and stone to create art that senses moods and movements as if enacting primeval vibrations and imagination. His figuration cast in metal is spontaneous and playful in light movements.
• His choice of material and size of work ranging from small to life size depends on his form and the idea behind the visual imagery. Free of any trappings and emerging out of his years of experimentation and innovation, his stick-like figures are known for their charm and personality.
• The sculptor continues to delight his viewers with his dynamic works reflecting movement and prompts us to get a little philosophical with its thought provoking themes.

A Kaleidoscopic view of art history of America

‘Artists in America: Highlights of the Collection’ from the New Britain Museum of American Art surveys 300 years of great American painting rarely seen on Long Island. Its 79 artworks, which date right from the early 1700s to the exciting present incorporate history painting, portraits, landscape, still life, modernist abstraction and other forms with significant instances of fascinating photography, collage and other unconventional media. Here are the highlights of this kaleidoscopic exhibition as elaborated in an accompanying note:   

• Major artists from every era of American art are on view, including John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Robert Motherwell and Sol LeWitt.
  
• Norman Rockwell’s beloved paintings portray a wholesome, idealized America while Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton celebrate the rural and local, hard work and honest labor. Paintings from the Hudson River School by renowned artists Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church and John Frederick Kensett focus on the sublime grandeur of American landscapes.
  
• American Impressionist painters Frederick Carl Frieseke and Theodore Robinson capture beautiful moments through sketchy brushstrokes, brilliant color, and ephemeral atmospheres. Influenced by European art movements of the early twentieth century, American Modernists including the Precisionist Charles Sheeler and Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb emphasize the industrial, the international, or the psychological through gesture, texture, surface, geometry, shape, form and color.
  
  
• The work of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman, Rashaad Newsome and Radcliffe Bailey coalesce around the politics of feminism and sexual identity, the issues of multiculturalism and social reform, as well as concern for the environment and natural resources.
  
• All works in the exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Art are selected from the permanent collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut. The presentation of Artists in America is organized by Museum Director Karl Emil Willers, working with Deputy Director Fernanda Bennett, Assistant Curator Rhianna Ellis, and the curatorial interns Andrea Chang, Faith Natalie Friedfeld, Brett Garde, Elizabeth Shaja and Danielle Sweeny.

Holistic view of cultural forces in the 21st century

The chief curator at Creative Time, New York’s prestigious art organization, Nato Thompson is also the editor of A historic Occasion - Artists Making History, ‘The Interventionists - A Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life’, and ‘Experimental Geography - Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism’. Creative Time has commissioned as well as presented several public art projects with thousands of practitioners throughout New York, across the US, and all around the world.

One thing significant to him is that the language about art world is predominantly still operating as if we are back right at the start of the 20th century. Even as many theorists have constantly interrogated ideas of intrinsic beauty and so on, the lexicon used for discussing art has progressed, he asserts. In fact, it has become in some ways more conservative since the market has emerged as a major force, particularly in the US.

Discussions regarding art tend to get stuck in what the mainstream market is willing to sustain and fund. In this backdrop, he hopes the book will produce the various different ways to think and discuss art - not simply whether it’s of good quality or bad - you can deeply think about what it actually does, different levels of engagement, and what pedagogy is. In other words, there is a whole other set of visual language skills as well as metrics for measuring success that can be applied to art, which is different from the typical language of poetry or beauty.

The kind of issue he comes at, going beyond art specifically, is to take a holistic view of cultural forces in the 21st century in comparison to those at the start of the precious century sans intrusion of radio, TV, and the Internet - that kind of very conscious manipulation of the symbolic visual and creative realm, which has dramatically changed the way we understand art, and even our everyday life cycle is understood.

What is growingly universal is the realization that culture is an entity made by common people. Today everyone is a videomaker, a photographer, a creator. They routinely make and remake culture without even thinking or acting as an artist, the change that he tries to fathom in this thought-provoking document.