Ipshita Sen of Saffronart shares a note on the current exhibitions at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

New York: After a long hot summer, Vadehra Art gallery in New Delhi, welcomed the new art season with cutting edge solo exhibitions by artists Charmi Gada Shah & Sujith SN. The exhibitions are presented as part of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s (FICA) Emerging Artist Award 2011, shared by the two artists.

Charmi Gada Shah, a Mumbai based artist shows the underlying beauty in the undervalued and the forgotten to the audience through her aesthetic lens . Her solo show, titled “Neighbourhood Souvenirs”, includes work that can be defined as ‘architectural sculptures’, painstakingly created with construction debris around her Mumbai neighbourhood; salvaged wood, concrete blocks and plaster.

“It is a slow process that captures the degradation and loss of a particular time, architecture and lifestyle,” said Shah.

Her innovative re-constructs of broken interiors and once standing architecture, in exquisitely detailed and three dimensional miniature models, reveal untold stories and resonate stories of a forgotten past. Her work powerful in character, emanates the emotion of loss, instigating one to remember and celebrate the rich elements of a lost past.

“A city has its own character and globalization tends to remove these differences and introduce a similitude in the city. My work speaks of this loss of cultural moorings.”

 Sujith SN’s exhibition of watercolors titled “Psalms of an Invisible River” speaks in a dialect of Holbeinesque metaphors and meanings. His large-scale paper works, radiate a poetic and apocalyptic oeuvre. The undercurrent of his work communicates with an audience through the metaphor of an invisible river, as the title suggests. His work is narrative and conveys the underlying message of humanity’s relationship with the world and it’s other inhabitants. The invisible river that the artist illustrates could be any of the hundreds of forgotten and misused rivers that fertilize the Indian soil. His work thus portrays a double-edged metaphor, wherein one can relate it to the people and lives that go unseen and forgotten under the unappealing humdrum of urbanization.

“For the last two years I have been working on a body of watercolors that examine the concept of ‘what makes a city?’ from a different lens. The river is an important motif because civilizations and urbanization often takes place on the banks of a river. Very often the river changes its color and direction as a result of this so-called civilization,” says Sujith.

Both the artists bring forth the notion of reviving a forgotten grey past and provide the audience with a lens to see perspective and beauty in the hidden and undervalued.

Charmi Gada Shah has acquired her Bachelors in Fine Art from the Raheja School of Art in Mumbai, and further pursued her masters in Fine Arts at The Chelsea School of Art in London. She is the recipient of the ‘Promising Artist Award from Art India and India Habitat Centre in 2009. She currently lives and works in Mumbai.

Sujith SN has acquired his Bachelors in Fine Art from the College of Fine Art, Trissur and Masters in Fine Arts at the Sarojini Naidu School of Fine Art, Performing Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. He currently lives and works in Mumbai and Kerala.

The exhibitions are on until September 12. For more information click here.