ART COMES ON SITE PART I
Getting back to the physicality of art, a group of India’s leading galleries Vadehra Art Gallery and Nature Morte come together with an exhibition at Delhi’s Bikaner House, this March.
In the Post-COVID scenario, marking their presence felt with physical exhibitions at Bikaner House, a clutch of India’s leading galleries come together with an exhibition aptly titled On | Site, from the 3 to 9 March 2021. The exhibition features Vadehra Art Gallery, Nature Morte from Delhi, Chemould Prescott Road from Mumbai and Experimenter, Kolkata. We are told that ‘On | Site’ brings together some of the most crucial practices in contemporary art in the region.
“As part of On | Site, an endeavor focused on presenting critical art practices by important South Asian contemporary artists as we embrace a physical return to celebrated cultural institutions such as Bikaner House in New Delhi, Vadehra Art Gallery is thrilled to present Memory Keepers”
-Roshini Vadehra
Memory Keepers, features oil paintings by Atul Dodiya, a comprehensive set of works by Pulitzer prize-winning architect B.V. Doshi and a series of new paintings by Arpita Singh.
Atul Dodiya’s body of work titled Evening Walk and Other Paintings explores an encyclopedic approach to the historical world through the anxieties of ignorance and manufactured, de-intensified sensory experiences that make what survives in public memory and collective consciousness as uncertain as the fate of individual protagonists.
Shilpa Gupta’s Recent Works examine the over-intensification of individual emotions resultant from the unexpected and in some ways ongoing lockdown due to the pandemic. As a joint presentation between Vadehra Art Gallery and Chemould Prescott Road, Shilpa Gupta will intervene minimally and thoughtfully with recently developed works, which delve into ‘distance, mobility and confinement’ that surfaced through the last year.
In her latest body of watercolours and oil paintings, titled Homeward, Arpita Singh’s cartographical autobiographies assume new dimension through an intensification of colour, accenting her imagined landscapes with the flourish of expressionist emotion. Singh’s compositions do not prioritize the public fact or mythical over the personal. Her individual nostalgia evocatively intervenes in cultural narratives surrounding control and freedom, especially those of women.
Curated by Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, B.V. Doshi’s Remnants of Memories encapsulates a body of work from the architect’s long-standing and illustrious career along with some older drawings and new paintings, including a teak-wood door designed previously for Gunvant Mangaldas House in Ahmedabad.
The collaborative enterprise ‘On | Site’ also features a Drawing Salon, which celebrates the ‘line’ as the able-bodied, foundational element that it is, hinged on tenets of choreography and composition that guide conceptual expression and formal experiments. Included in our presentation here, will be drawings by artists Atul Dodiya, Arpita Singh, Shilpa Gupta and Sudhir Patwardhan.
Nature Morte is showcasing the works of three artists Mona Rai, Bharti Kher, and Tanya Goel. They are three generations of artists working today who propose abstraction as a correlative to current advancements in Science. They create artworks without subjects, pictures that are determined by the unorthodox materials from which they are made, images that coalesce as much in the mind as by the eye. Individual units, often of a diminutive scale, are multiplied as a whole, subjected to forces of both order and chaos, swarmed into fields of energy. These artworks can be paired with advances in the harnessing of cutting-edge theories such as nano-technologies, quantum computing, and genome sequencing.
In addition, Nature Morte exhibits works by Asim Waqif, LN Tallur, and Martand Khosla which expand upon this dialogue between Art and Science.
Clearly the month of March has much to give us to view and ponder over and one looks forward to the renewed possibility of interacting and viewing artwork in the physical realm once again. Visit Bikaner House to catch up!
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images courtesy: Artists and galleries featured
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://instagram.com/naturemorte_delhi?igshid=5d9os33v2nc4
https://instagram.com/vadehraartgallery?igshid=101rr0xew19c9
