Layered Meanings - Ten leading Contemporary Artists Gallery Beyond Curated by Vibhuraj Kapoor

Layered Meanings - Ten leading Contemporary  Artists 

 

“The Legacy” An Exhibition of Photographs by veteran photojournalist Mukesh Parpiani

Legendary photojournalist Mukesh Parpiani’s need to chronicle the unusual began at a very young age when he first began to help his brother. His elder brother who was fascinated by photography, had a darkroom at home, and Mukesh used to wash his prints. Gradually, he began to work towards achieving this dream. He enrolled at the Pillai School of Photography (1969-1970), after which, he worked in wedding and travel photography. During this brief stint, he realised that his city has so many intermingled narratives to offer, whose ever-evolving nature is simply waiting to be chronicled.

Mukesh Parpiani

In 1981, Russi Karanjia, the Editor of The Daily, a morning newspaper in Bombay, offered him a job as their photographer.At The Daily, Parpiani photographed many political leaders and celebrities. Due to this, he became a familiar name in the journalism fraternity. Viveck Goenka, the Chairman and Managing Director of The Indian Express, who had been following Parpiani’s work and career, saw potential in his vision. Eventually, he decided to recruit Parpiani as the photo editor of The Indian Express’ seventeen editions. During his time there, he covered historical events of significance nationally and internationally.Mid-Day, an afternoon tabloid, who noticed Parpiani’s work as a photojournalist and editor, decided to offer him a job as the photo editor. It was the beginning of many things - the turn of the century as well as the tectonic shift of photographic technologies. Tariq Ansari, the Managing Director of the newspaper, gave Parpiani the liberty to develop the department as he needed. Parpiani, upon recognising the dawn of DSLRs, requested Ansari to acquire them for the photo department. Under his tutelage, many young individuals became renowned documentary photographers and photojournalists.

Parpiani curated his first photo exhibition in March 1989 at Piramal Art Gallery of NCPA. His penchant for curating photography exhibition gave him the opportunity to continue even after his retirement at the age of 58.

In 2009, Khushroo Suntook, Chairman of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), offered him to head the Piramal Art Gallery. Suntook had been familiar with Parpiani’s work and entrusted him with the running of the gallery. For 14 years, Parpiani has single-handedly nurtured and educated the next generation of photographers. He has organised over 250 talks, workshops, exhibitions, and seminars to disseminate photography.

Parpiani has touched countless lives with his photographs while reforming countless more as a mentor. His strengths and humanity lie in his ability to mould the way we perceive Bombay, while his sensitivity and perceptiveness conquer the hearts of those fortunate individuals who have, knowingly or coincidentally, crossed paths with him 

Press Release

From: 17th to 30th January 2024

“The Legacy” An Exhibition of Photographs by veteran photojournalist Mukesh Parpiani

 

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery,

Terrace Gallery,

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400 001.

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 8108003311

Transient Landscape_Retrospective Show of veteran artist Late Yashwant Shirwadkar

When we first look at Yashwant Shriwadkar's painting, we are drawn to a vibrant, expansive canvas, that capture the fleeting light and ever-changing atmosphere in nature. The tactile strokes play with the viewer's senses, delivering an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness while masking carefully constructed compositions. Each time you look at his canvas, a new feature appears, as if purposefully hidden by the artist under the masterfully blended colors. Deep yellow flashed in the night, pastel blue fading into midday, and pink melting in the morning sky. 

Veteran artist Late Yashwant Shirwadkar   

Shirwadkar perceived our world quite differently. For him, the seemingly mundane sights became compelling experiences,as a cascading waterfall or a majestic mountain peak. He simply painted the things he saw and felt, surrendering to the experiences and situations of the moment. He had no interest in depicting history, mythology, or the lives of great individuals. Instead, he attempted to capture how a landscape or an object appeared to him at a particular instant. Varanasi held a special fascination for him, leading to more than 18 visits to the mystical city. The gentle waters of the Ganges, the boat rides, the morning worship at the Ghats, as well as the majestic architecture has been aptly arrested by the artist. His artistic journey also encompassed landscapes from Kerala, Rajasthan, Kashmir, and Goa, along with large commission canvases like Hyde Park and the Gateway of India. 

Painting - RAJASTHAN - 36 x 60 in

Shirwadkar's approach of using a palette knife and building up layers in oil-on-canvas aligns with the textural and vibrant qualities often associated with impressionistic art. It's a technique that can evoke a sense of movement and atmosphere in landscape paintings. Each layer was painted on top of the previous without waiting for the earlier layer to dry completely. Rather than worrying about the technical accuracy of the painting, he went with the flow of his mood and created a sense of movement in the work. Seeing him work on the colors with palette knife is a sight to behold, almost beyond words to describe. The colors seemed to merge one into another, slowly shifting: yellow to orange and then red, and at times blue slowly turned into green and vice versa. 

Color and light played a profound role in Shriwadkar's painting process. Before painting on the canvas, he made several sketches on site, in the open, using sunlight as the only source of light. By using low chroma variations and rendering shadows in color, the artist skillfully captured the fleeting nuances of natural light.He also tried to emphasize the passage of time in his works. The paint was left unmixed, producing a contrast between strokes that didn’t blend completely on the canvas but appeared so to the eye. The deliberate choice to forgo intricate details in favor of bold paint strokes added to the overall impact of portraying the essence of the subject. 

Shirwadkar's oil-on-canvases garnered widespread acclaim, resonating not just with Indian audiences but captivating hearts globally. He received invitations to prestigious international platforms, such as sponsored exhibitions and notable events like the 42nd Anniversary Leadership Summit in Washington in 2017, showcasing the artist's recognition on a global scale. His path in visual art, however faced several obstacles, stemming from initial resistance within his family against pursuing a career in the fine arts. Undeterred by opposition, his passion for painting prevailed, leading him to stand firm on his decision despite strong familial objections. Eventually, Shirwadkarwent on to study at the renowned Sir J. J. School of Arts in Mumbai, marking a crucial step in his artistic journey. 

Painting- SEASCAPE - 36 x 60 in

Creating art was a form of Sadhana—a daily practice, for the artist. He painted regularly, shaping a distinctive style that involved the use of a palette knife and occasionally unconventional mediums such as a shaving blade. Even after achievingmastery over his technique, he continued to paint with awareness, discipline and intention of growth. Like a spiritual practitioner (sadhaka) heworked to achieve control over ego, connect deeper, and realign with his’s inner self. 

Spanning over 45 years, Shirwadkar’s prolific artistic career was marked by an impressive legacy of around 100 solo exhibitions and over 260 group shows both in India and internationally. Through this extensive body of work, he not only established a prosperous art career but also earned a prominent reputation in the art world before his passing in 2020.The enduring allure of his works, continue to generate curiosity and awe in the younger generations of artists as well as viewers. 

It is interesting to note that in his inaugural solo exhibition in 1977, Shirwadkar showcased watercolorseascapes. Employing a technique of blending watercolors to achieve a bleed and bloom effect, he crafted misty seascapes with soft, faded edges. Carefully playing with light contrast, he diluted and highlighted specific areas while leaving others dry, inviting light into the artwork. This technique skillfully evoked a vaporous atmosphere, adding a unique dimension to his early watercolors. 

Shirwadkar's approach to painting landscapes went beyond mere depictions of sites or anonymous figures. His focus delved into capturing the enveloping warmth and color of sunlight, not merely the physical surroundings. His art aimed to encapsulate the transformative impact of sunlight on the specific moments, highlighting the soul of the scene and its evolution through time and atmospheric changes.

Transient Landscape

-          By Shraddha Purnaye – Curator and Writer

 

From: 9^th to 15^th January 2024

Retrospective Show of veteran artist Late Yashwant Shirwadkar

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery

Auditorium Hall

161-B, M.G. Road,

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400 001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

MGW 2024 | Areez Katki: As this melts on your knee at TARQ

About the Exhibition

The team at TARQ takes immense pleasure to introduce Areez Katki’s solo show titled As this chin melts on your knee. The exhibition presents a body of work created between 2022 and 2023, across the mediums of textile, paper and sculpture, delving deeper into Katki’s research and unfolding narratives. Exploring the tactile and sensuous nature of textiles has been a recurring focus in Katki’s practice over the past decade. As he gathers and repurposes old, found, and sometimes remnants of newer textiles, one can observe how each piece of cloth carries associations with material memory. These connections can be familial and deeply personal or, at times, reveal more political and historical threads.

Areez Katki Dream Valves, 2023 Kaolinite clay, raku, Caspian Sea sand Individual parts varied, total upon installation (base): 12.2 x 16.5 x 6.2 inches  Courtesy of Areez Katki and TARQ 

Through inquisitive research, Katki began studying the contents of Tablet IV from the Epic of  Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian odyssey. The narrative of the poem serves as the conceptual  tableau for Katki’s Oneiria series of embroidered panels, as well as their painted studies. Inspired by  Gilgamesh’s journey across an apocalyptic dreamscape with Enkidu, Katki exercised his own psychoanalytic dream-keeping journal where his anxieties of loss, death, and fear unfurled. 

Transcribing, illustrating, and embroidering these visions on khadi panels, Katki reveals his own surreal, often cinematic, visions interlaced with anxieties from a queer antecedent. Five Fragments, which precede the larger Oneiria panels, can be viewed as the artist’s early experiments with using Sumerian cuneiform—the language that the Epic of Gilgamesh was originally inscribed in four millennia ago. These panels are composed with cuneiform symbols which the artist has studied extensively, to form a glossary of unique phrases, made up of simple words that these compositions evoke both linguistically and pictorially. Extending his research around ancient Indigenous histories, Katki has closely examined what remains of Achaemenid art over the past seven years. The process began with an exploration of Persepolitan archives and propagated into a series of nine diptych works on paper. Eliminating scientific and archaeological precision, the works cite artifacts, architectural motifs and subjects from a destroyed and pilfered past, to now reframe and reimagine these histories in a series of enlivened polychromatic compositions.

Areez Katki Anointed 3: Saffron, 2023 Mixed media on Arches cotton paper 12.2 x 12.2 inches Copyright: Copyright Areez Katki, 2023

The newest addition to Katki’s visual language is his venture into three-dimensional earth-based forms where Kaolinite clay, a material sourced and processed from his mother’s garden in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, behaves as a cultural marker of geographic locationality. Katki’s fascination with archaeology and materials from the quotidian, often found and restored, has seen him venture into this arena of excavation and restoration that attempt to reframe the practice of archaeology as a pedagogy rooted in care.

Areez Katki Three clever boys, 2023 Watercolour on Arches cotton paper Top: 11.69 x 8.26 inches Bottom: 5.9 x 11.81 inches Diptych Copyright: Copyright Areez Katki, 2023

As articulated by Adwait Singh, who has written an essay accompanying the show, “Throughout the current body of work, we notice a use of history that can be termed queer. Katki deliberately hones  these unexpected and at times irreverent modes of accessing and mobilising the past perhaps as a  corrective to the differential resistance that the discipline has developed over the course of its established use. This resistance can prove particularly prohibitive to those in the margins who aspire to get their stories admitted into the high annals of history. Faced with systematic exclusions produced by inherent resistances that are as unforgiving as they are relentless, Katki seems to have come up with a reworked mandate: throw a wrench in history.”

Artist: Areez Katki 

About the Artist

Areez Katki's practice dwells around conceptual and material-based intersections which survey the phenomenology of postcolonial identities. Fragmentations of a migrant identity can be traced through objects and material culture, in the recesses of collective memories that host spiritual cosmologies and queering orientations. These relational embodiments and correspondences with materiality are underpinned in Sara Ahmed’s statement that, “Objects extend bodies, certainly, but they also seem to measure the competence of bodies and their capacity to ‘find their way’.” (‘The Orient and Other Others’ Queer Phenomenology 2006).

Navigating across disciplines and pedagogies, Katki’s practice looks toward generating deeper understandings of such affective material. His work also tends to pose questions around conditions such as hybridity, particularly through embodiments that have been subject to rupture. While investigative acts of gathering and conservation run throughout Katki’s nearly decade-long art practice, his writing contextualizes the repurposing of historic material through ongoing engagements with storied narratives and biomythography. Both practices examine the historic and the personal, using gestures which survey the nature of (our) relationships with sites and embodiments.

Katki's work has been exhibited across Oceania, Asia, North America and Europe. It is held in numerous public and private collections internationally. Katki has been invited to present a significant new body of work in ‘Personal Structures’ at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. He was recently appointed the Aotearoa NZ visual artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin for 2024–2025

As this chin melts on your knee

Areez Katki

TARQ

Preview: Thursday, 11th January 2024 | 5:00 – 9:00 pm 

Mumbai Gallery Weekend continues from Friday, 12th January – Sunday, 14th January, 11:00 am -

8:00 pm on all three days, Show continues till 24th February 2024 

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 am to 6:30 pm 

For further enquiries contact: press@tarq.in | +91 98213 32108  #ArtistsAtTARQ.

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