State of the Art

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Posts tagged with Indian Contemporary Art

Serigraphy: A Word of Advice for New Collectors

November 6, 2012

Amy Lin of Saffronart explores the benefits of collecting limited edition serigraphs for new collectors

New York: The questions “What should I collect?” and “Where should I begin?” come up very often for collectors looking at modern Indian art for the first time. Of course, there are the great masters, M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, V.S. Gaitonde and others, but originals cost a small fortune and are quite difficult to come by. So what can an aspiring young collector do?

Serigraph making process
Image Credit: http://www.archerindia.com

One possible starting point is serigraphs. Later this week, The Story by Saffronart will be featuring a collection of signed, limited edition serigraphs from modern Indian masters such as Husain, S.H. Raza and Thota Vaikuntam. It is a wonderful opportunity for young collectors to purchase works by renowned artists at affordable prices. Now, your next question will probably be: Seri-what?

Serigraphy is an English printing technique pioneered in the early 20th century. It’s similar to silk screening or screen printing, where a stencil is used to print directly on the paper. The stencil is made by stretching porous fabric over a wooden or metallic frame. Next, the printer will use paper or fabric to block off the image’s negatives. The stenciled screen is then placed over the printed medium while oil or water based ink is spread evenly across the screen. Finally, the artist uses a rubber squeegee to press the ink through the porous fabric and onto the paper below. If the artwork requires a different colour, the print is allowed to dry before another colour or stencil is applied. Here is a step by step demo of the process.

The result from this laborious process is a fine quality print that rivals the original but costs a fraction of the price. While a Husain original could easily fetch over $100,000, an authorized and signed serigraph print by the artist will only cost 3-5% of the price.

Skeptics may argue that investing in reproductions is not worth it. But many would agree that serigraphs are fine artworks in their own right. Each serigraph print differs slightly from the next, picking up subtle nuances in character and attitude through the printing process. In addition, most artists will print their serigraphs in limited, numbered editions, enhancing their exclusivity.

M F Husain designing a serigraphy scroll
Image Credit: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story
/Affordable+art/1/17766.html

Husain was one of the artists who championed the artistic value of serigraphs by collaborating with Anil Reila, founder of Ahmedabad’s Archer Art Gallery. In 2000, Husain designed his own serigraph scrolls and had 500 editions of his Ashtha Vinayak made. This ambitious project was a great success and the prints sold out within days. Husain viewed his art with a populous mentality, always wanting to ensure it would be accessible and affordable to as many as possible. Other galleries such as the Serigraph Studio have legitimized serigraphy as a true art form by holding exhibitions exclusively of these prints.

Perhaps it’s the linear nature of Indian art that makes it suitable for printing or its bold colours that beckon for reproduction. Either way, serigraph prints are an excellent point for young collectors to start their journeys with Indian art. As Relia puts it in an interview with India Today, “The value rises when the edition is sold out and availability becomes scarce.” And later adds, “With Indian art now getting appreciation and applause everywhere, it is important that people have easy access to art prints by the great artists of our country.”

Zarina: Paper Like Skin at the Hammer Museum

November 5, 2012

Guest Blogger Tracy Buck visits the first retrospective of artist Zarina Hashmi at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Los Angeles: On September 30, The Hammer Museum, located in Westwood near the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, opened the first retrospective of artist Zarina Hashmi.  Zarina: Paper Like Skin is currently on view until December 30, 2012; it then travels to the Guggenheim in New York in the early spring of 2013 and to the Art Institute of Chicago in summer 2013.  Zarina’s elegant and understated works, executed sculpturally and via the manipulation of paper, include woodcuts and etchings, paper that has been cut and pinpricked and woven, an original cut block, and bronze and tin sculpture.

Zarina, born in India in 1937, has lived in the United States since the 1970s.  The exhibition’s curator, Allegra Pesenti, worked closely with Zarina in her studio/home in New York City to select pieces that represent her large body of work dating from 1961 to the present.  Within these works – undertaken not only in her New York studio but in her various former homes in Thailand, India, Pakistan, Europe, and Japan – are quietly and poignantly woven themes of memory, displacement, movement, dislocation, and the intimate and pliable connection to homes current and remembered.

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Among her works are woodcut explorations of the trauma and loss during the India/Pakistan Partition (Dividing Line, 2001); the jagged Radcliffe Line here appears as a scar cut beyond even the otherwise contained boundaries of map and land mass.  A separate series (These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness [Adrienne Rice After Ghalib], 2003) envisions and commemorates various cities that have been bombed in recent years.  Homes I Have Made/A Life in Nine Lines, 1997 is a series of floor plans of houses and apartments throughout the world, rented and made into homes, however temporary, and now remembered.  An engagement with line, with darkness and white, with paper and its materiality and subtlety, are at the heart of these works.

Although most often associated with paper, one might consider Zarina to be an artist who works in the “medium” of Urdu as well.  In several of Zarina’s works (Letters From Home, 2004; Atlas of my World, 2001, These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness [Adrienne Rice After Ghalib], 2003; Travels with Rani, 2008, among others) the Urdu script becomes a raw material, visually manipulated, recalling both the histories of Independence and Partition of the subcontinent, as well as Zarina’s own story of her family’s move to Pakistan some years following Partition. It also recalls, to those who can read it, the ghazal tradition and its thematic weight of melancholy and loss, of separation and longing, of displacement and disconnect.

One might consider the medium of printmaking itself to work in a similar way.  The printmaking process is a series of elisions, of secrets, its final printed product a sort of masking of the intense physicality of carving a block and running a press. Unlike gestural painting, for example, that draws attention outright and purposefully to the physical effort of its production, printmaking operates via a system of reversals, removing rather than adding material to ultimately produce an image out of this void, obscuring the repetitive gouging to produce not scarred lines but rather the lack they result in, the finished product in the form of white emptiness of paper. This repetition and physicality is revealed in her pinpricked, knotted, and scarred paper works, but subtly – in slightly raised white surface and shadow on white page; they record persistence rather than proclamation.

The fact that the show was lovingly and painstakingly conceived and researched by curator Pesenti is clear in the beautiful execution of the exhibition and in its quiet and respectful design. The exhibition’s catalog, with notable essays by Pesenti and by UCLA professor of Comparative Literature Aamir Mufti, replicates this care and attention and offers further insight into the work and life of Zarina, her choice of paper as medium and her connection to, and implications of, her use of Urdu. This retrospective, a first for the artist and, it may be said, long overdue, speaks quietly but powerfully of home and memory and its various definitions and delineations, in an abstract but deeply evocative language.

Watch Zarina talk about her work and this retrospective in a conversation with the exhibition curator here.

Tracy Buck holds MA degrees in South Asian Cultures and Languages and in Museum Studies, and has worked in the Collections Management and Curatorial departments of several history and art museums.  She is currently pursing a PhD in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

FIAC, Paris – An Art Fair Showcasing the Regulars

October 27, 2012

Guest blogger Kanika Anand shares her impressions of FIAC and its representation of Indian artists 

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Paris: Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, popularly know by the acronym FIAC, is France’s primary fair of contemporary art, hosted at the Grand Palais in Paris in October every year.

Enthused by my first visit to the fair and the general buzz of art events around it in Paris, I made my way one rainy evening to discover for myself the depth of the hullabaloo. The fair offered the usual suspects of the contemporary art world, both in terms of galleries as well as artists, such as White Cube, David Zwirner, Lisson, Victoria Miro, Galerie Perrotin along with their blue chip artists Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor & Yayoi Kusama. Takashi Murakami bedazzled and Paul McCarthy mocked… and shocked! Incidentally, this edition of FIAC marked Gagosian Gallery’s debut at the fair. These art market biggies dominated, if not wholly comprised the selection at FIAC.

Indian representation was limited to artists who already have a market in Paris and could be better defined as international artists of Indian origin. Widely exhibited in Europe, Mithu Sen’s solo show ‘Devoid’ opens today at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris. This will be the artist’s first solo in France, although her work has been exhibited at FIAC before. Hanging in the gallery’s booth at FIAC was Mithu’s You taste like Pao Bhaji alongside a sculptural work by the gallery’s long time represented artist, Rina Banerjee. Banerjee already has a marked presence in Paris; noteworthy of mention was her solo exhibition, Chimeras of India and the West at the prestigious Guimet Musee in 2011.

A series of 10 ‘Untitled’ drawings by N.S.Harsha hung on the outside wall of Greene Naftali Gallery (New York). Zarina Hashmi’s beautiful gold flaked ‘Tasbih’ hung in the corner of Jeanne-Bucher/Jaeger Bucher’s  (Paris) booth, in the deserving company of Joan Miro and Susumu Shingu. Tasbih is from Zarina’s most recent body of work shown at the gallery in a solo exhibition titled Noor last year.

A painted store shutter titled Mumtaz by Atul Dodiya and a painting by Jitish Kallat adorned two main walls of the large booth of Galerie Daniel Templon (Paris). The last day of FIAC coincided with the conclusion of Atul Dodiya’s first solo exhibition in Paris – Scribes from Timbuktu at their gallery space. The gallery has in the past supported Indian and other Asian artists, showcasing works by Sudarshan Shetty, Anju Dodiya, Hiroshi Sugimoto & Yue Minjun.

Two round shiny Anish Kapoor steel works in gold and purple, one each at the booths of Lisson (London/ Milan/ New York) and Gladstone Gallery (New York/ Brussels) shimmered akin to the gloss of the fair itself. But for me, the fair lacked spunk – no experimental works, no new names, no interesting project booths and notably no Indian galleries! It was all that I ‘expected’, but then again I’m no collector.

FIAC, Paris runs several parallel events and programs around the fair. More information is available at http://www.fiac.com/.

Kanika Anand is an art professional and budding curator specializing in Indian contemporary art. She holds a degree in Art History from the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, and has worked in the field for five years with Gagosian Gallery, Gallery Espace and Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi. She is currently pursuing the Curatorial Training Program at the Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble, France, in line with her interest to responsibly curate projects towards making art more accessible as well as inter-disciplinary.

Queens Museum of Art presents After Midnight: Indian Modern and Contemporary Art, 1947-1997

October 22, 2012


Manjari Sihare of Saffronart shares details of a forthcoming conference on modern & contemporary Indian art in New York

 New York: In 2014-15, the Queens Museum of Art will present the exhibition The Rising Phoenix: A Dialogue Between Modern and Contemporary Indian Art (working title), organized by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala.  In advance of the exhibition, the Queens Museum in conjunction with New York University’s Asian Pacific American Institute presents After Midnight: Indian Modern and Contemporary Art, 1947-1997, a two-day symposium on October 26-27, 2012 at New York University.

After Midnight: Indian Modern and Contemporary Art, 1947- 1997, takes its impetus from the exhibition. The symposium contemplates and compares two critical moments of Indian history: the first, the period of post-Indian independence that began in 1947, one of the most critical moments in the history of Indian modern art which saw the rise of the Progressives Artists Group; and the second, the globalization of Indian art that started in 1997 with a younger generation of artists including Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, and Sharmila Samant, presented with opportunities to travel, scholarships and residencies abroad that expanded their horizons.  This period was also when Indian artists started showing in large-scale international exhibitions and biennales. The interval between 1947 and 1997 also marks first fifty years of India’s independence, a significant period in Indian history.

The symposium will undertake an examination of a space between these two fractured moments, Progressives/Modern and the contemporary artists, and will also address the larger question of modernity found and viewed from different geo-political perspectives that belong to Africa, Asia and Latin America to counter the narrative of the west.

For a detailed program schedule, visit the Queens Museum website. 

Watch this space for more updates on this important Symposium.

Folk and Tribal Art: Gond Painting

August 20, 2012

Josheen Oberoi of Saffronart looks (very briefly) at what constitutes Gond Art

New York: Folk and tribal arts are relatively less exposed forms of narrative Indian art and contain within them a gamut of styles originating from various geographical regions in India; Gond art is one such art form.

Jangarh Singh Shyam
Untitled, 1984
Acrylic on canvas, 55.5 x 32.5 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

The term Gond art refers to paintings that emerge from a heterogeneous tribal group called the Gond or Koiture, mostly centered in Madhya Pradesh. Even within the phrase Gond art there is a wide spectrum of artistic styles, primarily connected to distinct painters and their practices. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts’s (IGNCA) research discusses the cultural roots of the Gonds and also indicates the unifying theme in Gond art – the pervasive presence of nature. Their pantheon of gods are intimately connected to nature and their strong tradition of oral narrative seemingly transfers to their paintings as well.

The first Gond artist to gain national recognition was Jangarh Singh Shyam (who died in 2001), and in fact, the present genre of Gond painting is called Janagarh Kalam after his pioneering style. He was discovered in the 1980s by the late Jagdish Swaminathan, then Director of Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal. Jangarh Singh Shyam was the first artist to paint on paper and canvas instead of directly on earth or walls of the home. The intricacy and control in his dot-based designs is seen in the works of all Gond artists, as are his most common subjects – the tree of life and various animals.

Ram Singh Urveti
Untitled, 2011
55.5 x 45 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

The tree of life is also a favourite subject of Ram Singh Urveti and Suresh Kumar Dhruve. Ram Singh Urveti uses a deep colour palette and combines his imagery of trees with a variety of animals, creating a synergy of plants and animals in his work, while Suresh Kumar Dhruve often presents trees almost like a totem pole, erect and still, surrounded by human figures.

Jangarh Singh Shyam’s wife Nankusia Shyam and daughter Japani Shyam are also renowned Gond artists. Their paintings are inhabited by the world of animals, although their individual aesthetics are distinct. Nankusia Shyam often paints animals from her childhood memories or shares her impression of urban culture in the shape of these animals. Japani Shyam, on the other hand, almost seems to capture the eco systems in which animals survive; her works are denser, they are reproductions of the worlds that animals and plants survive in.

Japani Shyam
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic and ink on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

In Narmada Prasad Tekam’s painting, plants and animals share equal footing; they are not shown as a continuum, as in Jangarh Singh Shyam or Ram Singh Urveti’s work. These detailed works contain everyday creatures, recognizable in their presence.

Narmada Prasad Tekam
Untitled
Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 45 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

Durga Bai’s works, which have been widely exhibited in India and abroad, show a dynamism and movement within the picture that is unique to her. Brightly hued, hers are narratives of folk tales and deities, of goddesses remembered.

Durga Bai
Untitled
Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 123 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

Dhavat Singh
Tiger Tales 1, 2009
Acrylic and ink on canvas, 67.5 x 47.5 inches
Image courtesy: Saffronart

Dhavat Singh’s Tiger Tales are vivid representations of tigers, their interactions with their surroundings and the folklore that surrounds these majestic animals. Equal parts contemporary and traditional; these are visceral works, extending the parameters of Gond art, as it stands today.

The story telling, the fantastical animals and trees is a thread that runs through the work of Gond artists, rooted in their folk tales and culture. However, each of these artists, as evident in these images, has developed a specific language within these narratives creating a richness of aesthetic forms and styles.

These artists represent only a fraction of practitioners of Gond art. A more extensive list and information is at the IGNCA website.