Post the art fair in New Delhi, artists continue to command attention as much for their work as for their storytelling
As I write this, Manu Parekh is preparing for perhaps the most critical opening of his six-decade long career—okay, make that the second-most important show of his career. The first was his retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2017 when, for the first time, his collective works were shown together to critical acclaim. The exhibition then travelled to the NGMA outposts in Mumbai and Bengaluru and acted as adrenalin on the artist who vowed to not rest on his laurels. Despite knee replacements and a severe hip injury, he began to change course from his Banaras-themed landscapes to vividly-coloured encaustic paintings celebrating the cadences of fertility. This was his celebratory depiction of tantric symbols and sexuality. In Parekh’s paintings, a still-life of a vase of flowers appears infused with sensuality achieved through bursts of colour and a suggestion of fecundity of the kind that sculptor Meera Mukherjee was known for.
His Flower Sutra exhibition—dear reader, don’t miss this if you are in New Delhi—will run through the month at Dhan Mill’s Nature Morte, a surprising pick by a gallery known for supporting cutting-edge contemporary artists. But then, Parekh’s relevance and ability to re-invent himself has been chimerical. At India Art Fair last month, his was the largest painting on display, a single work spread across an entire booth dedicated exclusively to it. Even more interestingly, his paintings were picked up by Mumbai’s Chanakya School of Craft and converted into large tapestries that formed an imposing background for Christian Dior’s post-covid haute-couture show, before being exhibited at Mumbai’s Snowball Studios.
That validation was hard won and has come late in his career. An alumnus of the JJ School of Art, Parekh’s early struggles included seeking employment with Pupul Jayakar’s Weavers’ Service Centre that hired artists to travel to the interiors to work with textile weavers and printers. Parekh’s most memorable beats were Madhubani in Bihar and Bagru in Rajasthan, even as he relocated from Mumbai to Kolkata to New Delhi. A trip to Banaras proved providential as he found his muse in a city that mixed the sacred with the profane and became the celebrated subject of his paintings (and few sculptures). Parekh’s work today continues to be a homage to the city even though it has evolved in recent years to combine rizzy elements of Hinduism and pop culture. You might need to wear dark glasses to protect yourself from the bright hues of his compositions but there’s no hiding from the fact that Parekh has found his beat to become one of India’s most relevant modern-contemporaries. Inka time aa gaya!
Actually, it’s the time of storytellers and mythmakers in the world of art. Where do artists find their subjects? From where do they get their colours? Sidharth (he uses only his first name) gave us an example of his practice at a recent Pink Chair People event in Noida, sharing (actually, singing) the different colours his mother would tell him about as a child in rural Punjab. Today, Sidharth claims to have obtained over six hundred organically obtained colours of his own at his Kaladham studio where he creates spectacular works that combine the vibrancy of Punjab frescos, Tibetan thangkas, Western modernism and the magic of Indian miniature paintings. He is maverick, given to drawing from the folk homilies he learned in his childhood, even though he ran away from home to train as an artist and novitiate monk at a Buddhist monastery.
As he dribbled paint on to sheets of handmade paper and drew at an astonishingly rapid pace before a live audience, Sidharth continued to regale them with stories of a tall order, sipping on a single malt as he exulted in the magic of his own brushwork. Sidharth’s paintings emerge from a place of intimate connection with his land and roots and feature autobiographical elements in a way that is not obvious. Green fields stretch out over which monks congregate or children play hopscotch under a blue sky. This escapism to childhood is based on memories but also pays homage to the holy men and their teachings that lie at the heart of Hinduism in north India that informs his work. He paints figures without noses—though you hardly notice their absence—because, he says, a man’s nose reflects his ego, so why not banish it from the tales over which he has control.
If his current series is documentative of the course of his own journey or life, an earlier series on the Ganga explored the landscapes and cultures of the lands through which the river flowed, recorded in his paintings by way of ecological storytelling in which fakirs and other mendicants appeared, different living beings were represented, and events were detailed with a painter’s precision in glowing, jewelledcolours in all the six hundred hues the artist has at his command.
At the art fair this year, I missed the feisty presence of a regular participant and visitor, Latika Katt, who became an unlikely, if outspoken, friend over the years. Only days earlier, she had collapsed while installing her bronze sculptures in Jaipur’s Sculpture Park at Jaigarh Fort. Born in Dehra Dun where she studied at the boys’ Doon School courtesy her botanist father, Katt took up studying sculpture as a challenge first at Banaras Hindu University, completing her masters from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda before returning to Banaras where she married her art teacher, Balbir Katt, and proceeded to create a successful career as a sculptor. Her larger-than-life size portrait sculptures of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi gained her proximity to the Congress but it was her abstract sculptures that won her critical renown.
Drawn to the most esoteric subjects, she chose to depict termite hills, underground tree roots, jackfruits and equally eclectic natural subjects in her practice, using stone for most of her work that she sculpted using a variety of handheld and machine tools at her riverside studio in Banaras. The stone she used was never simply ordered but selected personally by her from different quarries across the country and she supervised its loading and unloading with as much care (and as many hard-hitting curses in coarse Hindi) as she could muster. At her last exhibition at India International Centre in New Delhi, she did exceedingly well and even supervised the movement and installation of a sculpture to be displayed at India Habitat Centre long past midnight. She wouldn’t let a 500-kilo black marble work I’d picked up be moved by a team of professional art packers, insisting on specialists from somewhere in old Delhi to execute the job to her satisfaction.
She didn’t always work in stone, resorting to quite unusual choices like papier-mache and other fragile materials. She was an outspoken feminist as a person but her work spoke of humanitarian values. From large institutional sculptures—you can easily spot the huge totem outside the ONGC building next to DLF Emporio in Vasant Kunj—to works of her own that she discovered on a recent visit to Canberra, Katt was someone who enjoyed experimenting with materials including studio pottery. But few knew that she could draw almost as well as she could sculpt. Hospitalised last year with a lung infection, she filled a sketchbook with drawings of her impaired lungs resembling the strong stone roots she was so fond of sculpting. Eventually, the lungs proved too fragile, but she has left behind her stone roots sculptures for us to understand the hidden mysteries that make up our world.
It is more difficult to segregate Satish Gupta into a compartment. Is he a painter? Or sculptor? In reality, he is both, having begun his career as a painter before going on to make giant-sized installations for some of the country’s leading collectors. And though his love for sculpture has not petered out, it is delightful to see his return to painting in his early, zen-like manner, with landscapes in which the sacred is an important entity in his work. In the previous edition of the art fair, there was an entire booth dedicated to Gupta’s sculptures, but in in new studio in Jorbagh, there is evidence of his interest and return to painting. Hopefully, it will be on view at the next edition of the fair.
But a sculptor who made a striking return to the fair was Ravinder Reddy. There was a time when you couldn’t coast past art fair booths without stumbling across his works, but in recent editions his work was scarcer and he was more noted for its absence. The return, this year, of the Andhra-based artist was a welcome addition and brought into focus, yet again, the eroticisation that is possible even when representing just a woman’s head, even though his nude studies of corpulent women were always a popular draw. With collectors around the world, Reddy’s sexualized female sculptures, heads and reliefs depicting women’s hair and floral accouterments proved compelling at the booths where his work was shown.
Some of the collateral art fair exhibitions drew attention to vastly different artists and their practices. That at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art showcased a retrospective of Gulammohammed Sheikh, the much-loved artist-teacher from Baroda whose earlier exhibition at Bikaner displayed his recent collaborative paintings with a bunch of miniature artists. Titled Of Worlds Within Worlds, Sheikh’s 190 works showed of his repertoire of six decades including his seminal political works. A founder-member of Group 1890, Sheikh’s works address the importance of the artist as an idealogue but also as a storyteller, and no one has chronicled India—actually, Gujarat—as well as Sheikh. Generations to come will continue to listen to his visual tales.
Another was Jayasri Burman who packed a full house at her opening of The Whisper of Water. The Song of Stars, an exhibition that was an ode to the sea and its shoreline in a body of work at variance with what she has shown earlier. A trained artist from Kolkata married to the hugely popular Paresh Maity, Burman has been stepping into her own with a renewed confidence ever since her Bikaner House retrospective, ghjgjjg. Her work locates the woman as a source of infinite grace and power, exactly as nature itself is: capricious, changeling and ever-evolving.
In particular, Jayasri Burman’s abstract paintings proved not just a surprise but one that gained her the acclaim often denied to figurative painters who do not resort to distortion in their work. Burman has resolutely defended her aesthetic and it seems finally that collectors are willing to lend her their ear. If her abstract works used beads and pearls, a large still-life drew audiences for her use of seashells (inside of floral blooms), suggesting a happy compromise between reality and fantasy.
In representing an Indian style or aesthetic in her work, Burman was not alone. At her new studio in unlikely Okhla, Seema Kohli too diverged from her known style to present an exhibition that should ideally have been the premise of a museum. Khula Aasman was based on her father’s memories of his father’s memories. This secondary recalling was accompanied by readings and recitations from her father’s recently published autobiography. Kohli accompanied it with her paintings that alone were an aberration, apart from her largely figurative works, depicting stunning landscapes that mapped the family’s journey and history in pre-Partition India as hakims—medical practitioners of Unani medicine.
At a walkthrough she led for a group of Pink Chair People, Kohli pointed out the large jars of murabbas she had prepared herself following family recipes for were considered tonics to balance the body’s humors. She also recreated the formulas for various potions and unguents based on plants—stems, leaves, flowers, roots—that she painted on the wall to recreate a hakimi studio. A set of drawing of plants with their Urdu, English and botanical names was acquired by the British Museum and was displayed at the exhibition before being shipped there.
Elsewhere, before the art fair but as a collateral event at Palette, the printmaker Anupam Sud displayed a body of early and more recent works. The eminent printmaker, a prominent artist-teacher from the College of Art, Delhi, had last been part of a retrospective show at KNMA. Now in her eighties, Sud is turning her back on printmaking—which can be arduous—to opt for painting. Though she painted through most of her career, it is recently she has returned to it as a full-time option. Sud questions patriarchy and has never shied away from representing the female or male nude, but her work is oftener about relationships and the inequality built into them by society. Sud’s work is like her, appearing gentle and soft spoken but with the ability to surprise you with both her wit and her bite.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K. S. Shekhawat is a former columnist and editor with experience in journalism and publishing. He has written several books, the most recent on art and artists.
