Art Blogazine: February 2023

Saturday, 25 February 2023

थूक लगाना मना है - Miniature postage stamp masterpieces

ARKA Art Trust

Presents

We are invite you for- थूक लगाना मना है - Miniature postage stamp masterpieces

World artists create there artworks on Post ticket

Curator: Nilesh Kinkale

at Nippon Gallery -Mumbai

Tuesday, 14 February 2023

‘The Caves’ at Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai from 15th to 21st February 2023.

The show will be inaugurated on 15^th February 2023 at 6pm by Shri. Rajeev Mishra (Director of Art, Govt. of Maharashtra Principal, Sir JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai), Dr. Santosh Kshirsagar(Dean Sir JJ Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai), Shri. Pankaj Kanal(Principal Architect Designous Build Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Mumbai.

Artist: Santosh Kshirsagar

I belong to a family of artists and art lovers. I have been fortunate to have a successful career in architectural and design photography and many of the design stories photographed by me have been regularly covered in nationally and internationally renowned publications. I have been privileged to have exhibited my work in Pune on three occasions, once in association with one reputed architect firm and twice in collaboration with a media house. I have been interviewed and felicitated by a design forum. More than all these professional achievements, I believe my professiona has helped me find out the purpose of my life.

As a child, I remember visiting ‘Jehangir’ with my father to experience the art of many stalwarts. In those innocent days I could meet and see the work of masters like Bendre, B. Prabha, Hebbar and many more. The dream of having my own exhibition at Jehangir might have initiated there is my subconscious and is getting fulfilled after years of long waiting.

I am feeling very happy and blissful to share that I am having my first solo show titled ‘The Caves’ at Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai from 15^th to 21^st February 2023. In this show I am going to exhibit some selected ‘ Stonescapes’, which I have captured in last decade. For me it was a spiritual journey from shooting an ‘object’ viewed through the lens to the ‘subject’ felt with the heart and soul. In short they are an extension of architectural photography and can be named as ‘soulful light paintings’ captured though my camera as ‘the’ tool.

In my journey of architectural photography, I came across many master architects and creative designers. World renowned architect Shri. Christopher Benninger sir is one of the most important amongst them all. He not only blessed me with the inauguration of my second exhibition in Pune, but also inspired me to set larger goals in life. Now, I sincerely wish to dedicate this exhibition ‘The Caves’ to him.

So, my humble wish and desire that you all join us at Jehangir on 15^th February at 6pm for the inauguration ceremony to celebrate art, enjoy the unknown stories of our bygone era and feel the life beyond life in ‘The Caves’.

The show will continue till 21^st February 2023 between 11am to 7pm.

Press Release

From: 15^th February to 21^st February 2023

‘THE CAVES’

A Solo Show of Stonescapes…

By well-known Architectural Photographer Anand Diwadkar

VENUE

Jehangir Art Gallery

M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda,

Mumbai 400 001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: 98230 80623

Email: diwadkar.anand@gmail.com

Press Release From: 14th to 20th February 2023 “Vasundhara” An Exhibition of Paintings By Well-known artist Arpitha Reddy

Artist: Arpitha Reddy

Arpitha Reddy, an accomplished artist from Hyderabad, will be showcasing her recent paintings on "Vasundhara" the goddess of the earth at Gallery No: 2 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai from 14th February 2023 to 20th February 2023.

This exhibition is a collection of large format paintings celebrating her beauty, her boon giving and nurturing ability. She also presented Lord Vishnu, god of love, benevolence and forgiveness in the form of " Varaha" protecting her for the preservation of the universe.

“ Her Vasundhara is a robust bright eyed beauty born of the expression of all that is beautiful, resonant, complete in both devotion as well as dedication to the idea of the eternal tree of life and Vasundhara as an avatar and consort of Lord Vishnu,” says art critic Uma Nair who has authored the sumptuous catalogue.

Nair a renowned and eminent art critic, has been writing for several prominent artists all over world more than three decades, has expressed that Arpitha's felicity with contour and colour is filled with simple means, and creates an inspirational impact. Nair’s authorship comes this month also at Centre Pompidou to celebrate Sayed Haider Raza at 100 years in a catalogue that is translated into French and carries her interview with Raza on Gandhi.

About the artist :

Arpitha an alumnus of JNFAU College of Fine Arts, trained in the temple mural style at Guruvayoor Institute of Mural Paintings. She has experience in numerous traditional art forms including Pata Chitra, Phad, Thangal, Cherial, Tanjore, Kalamkari, and has almost two decades of experience in practicing the murals. Now her works are an adaptation of the Kerala murals after she has given herself freedom to assimilate different traditional art forms into her paintings.

She has several awards and honors to her credit. She has exhibited her paintings in major cities of India and Abroad. Recently She represented India in a symposium at Samarkand during the Shanghai cooperative organization summit in September 2022, organized by the ministry of tourism and cultural heritage Uzbekistan.

International and Indian collectors

Her works belong to prestigious collections over the world. Various prestigious institutions and art collectors around the globe like MOSA- Museum of spiritual Art, Belgium, Venkateshwara College, New Delhi, Indira Nooyi, Chairperson and chief executive officer of Pepsico all have her works in their collection.

The exhibition will be graced by the brilliant abstractionist Prabhakar Kolte, Krishnakumar the Principal, at Guruvayur Devaswom Institute of Mural Painting from Trivandrum Kerala, Mrs Menon artist’s most respected guide and patron, as well as author and critic Uma Nair who will address the guests.

The show will be inaugurated on 14^th February 2023 at 5pm by Chief Guest Eminent artist Shri. Prabhaker Kolte, Special Guest of honour Shri. KU Krishna Kumar, Principal of Institute of Mural painting established by the Guruvayur Devaswom, Kerala, Mrs. Menon, The Secretary Jehangir Art Gallery Mumbai - the Honoured guest will be present at the inauguration of “ Vasundhara” . Proceeding of the evening will be done by Ms. Uma Nair, renowned art critic, who works and lives in Delhi.

Press Release

From: 14^th to 20^th February 2023

“Vasundhara”

An Exhibition of Paintings

Well-known artist Arpitha Reddy

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery

161-B, M.G. Road

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400 001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 95828 31664

art.vasundharajag@gmail.com

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

The Mystery Cult

These new paintings by Sachin Sagare, like his previous body of work, arrives in a headlong rush of invention festooned upon a canny theme, in this case the female body in nature. He places groups of rural women worshippers; he names them as nymphs, dryads and goddesses into clearings in deep, dark background, thus activating irresistible tropes of an Indian painting tradition meant for royals. A more occult art comes to mind in these unkempt, unruly wildernesses, one which begins with the temple women.

Artist: Sachin Sagare

The large acrylic paintings in the exhibition swirl chorus of graphically insistent folk women, white blossoms and filigreed stalks that recalls the backyard raptures of rural India. Sagare’s glades are uninhabited; their everyday ecstatic includes luminous beings, spirits of the feminine whose spare, archaic profiles float among the flowers. Faces, flowers, oil lamps and puja-thalis are painted with a kind of folk-art zeal while the cerulean temple walls behind, solidly modeled then dematerialized by dancing layers of sprayed pigment, is appealingly contrary in color, scale and attack.

Sagare’s experimental approach to mark-making thick or thin, macro or micro, tight or loose, brushed, sprayed or sponged goes for both background and figures. In one his paintings a lone woman in a classical pose is incised in green against the mottled background like a fading figure on a krater. Also cut from traditional lines, in this case black, are five hollow women in mystery cult, who seem to be lost, while by contrast, in the other work the three women protagonists are entangled in a single libidinous squiggle of green and yellow paint that, like flesh to verges on the repulsive. Changing tactics again, Sagare gives the golden apparitions to the three women with an earthy substance. They gesture with a narrative refinement that suggests, along with their warm, coppery tarnish, the microcosmos of an old temple pillar. Sagare, however, putting the brakes on such skillful seduction according to his restless temperament, encloses this exquisite scene in a dark, seething carving on temple panels and walls as brut as the figures are delicate.

Gender critique aside, the painting’s are busy, stop-motion scenography seems like an attempt to do the uncannily naturalistic, his figures form a certain logic to the way followed. The paintings in the show, for that matter, are distinctly re-engineered for function the small paintings marvelously contain their own charm. A large work rages a preposterously scumbled orange-green, barely contained by the jutting blue and purple forms of super-cooled, super-flat conifers. As in all the paintings, however experimental, internal typology is firmly organized motifs, motifs, figures and oil lamps. In this second large, ravishing version of the theme, clamorous day has turned to mysterious night. The precisionist symbolism echoes in Sagare’s crisp and fluorescent canvases, scintillating against a nocturne of blue-violet and black. Yet rogue textures icky drips and thorny bumps interrupting the most beautiful passages remind us of art concoction.

The paintings of Sachin Sagare display an overwhelming elasticity to them. Visceral grit, orchestrated by a network of collaged material, weaves its way into more traditional painting language. Elegance is replaced with subtlety of intrusion and the tenderness of seamless collision. His figures are painted with skins that seem vividly translucent, allowing us to gaze through the stratified layers of paint. Their luminescence seems both coy and purposeful, often serving as the only rational light source.

Sagare manages to excise gender performances from his paintings almost entirely In this intentional defamiliarization of space, he begins to deflate the omnipresence of normative social structures that forcefully define how and where conventionally feminine bodies are supposed to function. In this way, he prevents us from hijacking the agency of these figures forcing us to read their bodies as texts. Denying conventional legibility and insist upon the opacity of their own historical narratives.

What I find most intriguing about this work is the way Sagare leans into this obscurity instead of privileging clarity. This playful and at times spectacular irresolution plays a significant role in his work. Bodies are refigured as complex ensembles, brilliantly synthesizing the facility of his line, his deft paint handling, and a color sensibility. A collection of hieroglyphic hands, heads, with an elastic relationship to one another and to the spaces they occupy, these robust and curvaceous figures at times aggressively push the limits of the picture plane and at other times are jettisoned into the constellation of body parts strewn about the canvas.

With a firm and confrontational pose, torso twisted around and eyes focused back onto us and with a full view of his bare behind, the figure entices viewers toward this conceptual edge of the painting, reminding us that our polite curiosity is not to be trusted.

We do not miss the clarity of representational narratives in these paintings. Instead Sagare presents us with a curious proposition. What if we affirm the unconventional complexity in the bodies of the women folk? What happens to gender if we decenter masculinity and femininity and consider other modes of self–expression, displacing history to freely probe and repurpose the sources of our identity construction? There is no rush to answer these questions here. He instead forces us to sit, wholly attentive and present with every painting. This is encouraging.

- Abhijeet Gondkar

Press Release

31^st January to 6^th February 2023

“The Mystery Cult”

An Exhibition of Paintings by contemporary artist Sachin Sagare

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery

161-B, M.G. Road,

Kala Ghoda , Mumbai - 400 001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 9011251869

www.sachinsagare.com

"The Wandering Shadow" An Exhibition of Paintings by contemporary artist Milind Limbekar

This exhibition was inaugurated by Mr. Sudhir Mungantiwar( Minister of Cultural Affairs, Forest, Fisheries, Government of Maharashtra in the presence of many art dignitaries.

Artist Milind Limbekar

The Wandering Shadow

The wandering of mind and soul needs some place to open up. My recent series of paintings has got such space to explore. The present moment, has always a dual feeling of present and absent. The missing moment always travel with us and our wandering mind gets attracted to those whom you feel shall be yours. These missing moments are what I call shadow, they are almost everywhere. The animals in the painting are representation of curbed desires, the anthropomorphic forms that appears comes from anxiousness and split personality which is subtle and dramatic. No wonder the dramatization id shown always in night scenes because they are always hidden like mystery. You have to search and understand them the most vulnerable part in my work is the expression and gestures. I still feel it as incomplete process because the concept of my painting is abstract and can be better represented in abstract manner.