It is not uncommon to walk into a gallery or witness an art show that exhibits the works of your favourite artist, or brings together artworks spanning genres and generations. But it is a rarity for an established contemporary artist to share his canvas with a folk or traditional counterpart.
In its third show titled “Silent Dialogues”, Art Perspective opens up its gallery space to welcome the celebrated and unknown masters of Indian art and cultural milieu. From ideas of co-existence to gender issues, from city life to tribal traditions, this group show puts forward the pictorial dialogue between two spheres of creativity — the high art and traditional crafts.
The nine pair of artists who have worked together to create a common canvas include Anupam Sud with Nankushiya Shyam, Achuthan Kudallur with Neela Akbari, Shipra Bhattacharya with Komal Ramesh and Poonam Devi, Jai Zharotia with Narayan Bariki, Vasundhara Tiwari with Rahim Chitrakar, to name a few.
On coming up with this unique concept, Suruchi Saraf, director, Art Perspective, says, “We wanted to highlight traditional folk artists who remain on the fringes of our art heritage. And what better way to showcase their work, than in collaboration with some of the most reputed names in contemporary Indian art?”
She believes that the division between traditional art and craft and modern art are fast disappearing as people have started recognising the worth of indigenous arts.
New Delhi-based Anupam Sud has teamed up with Nankushiya Shyam, wife of the late tribal artist Jangadh Singh Shyam, to create a utopian world where all can co-exist with each other.
Their untitled canvas in mixed media shows a bluish figure swimming in a crystal-clear lake where several marine forms, including fish, crocodile, turtle swim alongside the floating body. In the backdrop stand billowing trees and animals that have come to drink at the waterhole. While the main figurative form has been rendered by Sud, the animals and marine life are painted in the signature style of Gond art by Shyam.
Achuthan Kudallar and Neela Akbari’s colourful rendition of city life looks like a patchwork quilt, with the Rajasthani images in fine miniature-like lines by Akbari juxtaposed with the masterful abstract strokes of Kerala-born Kudallur. The main image in their work is a blue horse that looks like a Rajasthani cloth puppet, while the other figure in the work is that of an elephant, which has been rendered as a hybrid creature of both tradition and modernity.
Warli artists Komal Ramesh and Poonam Devi have worked with Shipra Bhattacharya on the same canvas, whose central figure is a masculine body, made by the latter. On the rest of the canvas, Ramesh and Devi have created stories and myths around their everyday activities, ranging from pastoral festivals like sowing and harvesting to birth and death rituals.
“It was a great experience to work with an established artist like Shipraji. I was given full freedom to execute my elements on the canvas. I make works on paper and this was the first time I was working on canvas, but there was no pressure on me to work in a particular way. My Warli motifs are about our everyday activities and they come together beautifully with the work of the contemporary artist,” says Poonam Devi.
Seema Ghurayya’s quiet abstraction merges with Narayan Bariki’s bold blue lines depicting Goddess Durga as the slayer of the demon Mahishasura. While Ghurayya’s sublime white background is as abstract as it can get; Bariki’s figurative miniature of Durga makes the canvas a coherent piece of work.
Bariki also collaborates with Jai Zharotia to explore the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, between nature and mankind, and their joint canvas is replete with a plethora of forms and figures. A bull, tortoise, snake, horse and several other beasts form part of this imagery. On the margins stand archers with arrows to presumably shoot at the animals. All this is set against a sea of red, perhaps the blood bath that we are constantly engaged in the race for survival of the fittest. While the more abstract animal forms are rendered by Zharotia, the archers, who are also invocations of Arjun and Eklavya, are rendered in the traditional Patachitra style that Bariki follows. “I asked Bariki what he could do and when he decided to create figures with arrows, I decided to explore the concept of human ego and how it could be hunted down. It took us about a week to complete the canvas and while one does have to make small adjustments when you work with someone else, never did we feel that our art styles were exclusive of each other,” adds Zharotia.
The joint work by Amitava Das, Bariki and Nirmal Yadav is dominated by the presence of a maze-like central figure, which has been painted by Das, an abstract expressionist.
“We finished the canvas in two days. I enjoyed the experience because Bariki is not just a folk artist in the conventional sense. His work has a contemporary element and that’s the strength you see on the canvas. While I worked in my own abstract idiom, the subject matter we chose belongs to the traditional painting of Patachitra, a style practised around the Jagannath temple of Puri, and one which Bariki is trained in,” Das explains. In a stylised interpretation of the mythological story of Lord Krishna dancing on the many-hooded Sheshnag, Vasundhara Tiwari and Rahim Chitrakar have chosen to reinterpret the theme by essaying Krishna as an ordinary person, who is seen holding a larger-than-life serpent above his head. The pastel colours in the backdrop contrast this confrontational moment with a sense of calmness. While Tiwari is known for
her sensitive portrayal of issues of suppressed womanhood through subtle abstraction, Chitrakar draws from the rich tradition of his tribal Santhal painting that works with natural colours.
The show will conclude on October 30 and is open for public viewing from 11 am to 7 pm in Delhi.