By IANSlifeNew Delhi, Feb 5 (IANSlife) Vadehra Art Gallery presents a special exhibition of curated works by late Indian modernist Nasreen Mohamedi, from the collection of the Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan, which will be on view during and after India Art Fair 2023.Mohamedi’s close friend and fellow artist Nilima Sheikh will address the audience at the preview, bringing her insightful energy to a corpus of over 40 works by the revered artist, including drawings, paintings and photographs from across the artist’s life.
Born in Karachi in 1937 to a wealthy and progressive family – with a long stay in Mumbai and briefly Bahrain – Nasreen Mohamedi studied at the St.Martin’s School of the Arts in London and later lived in Paris, where she worked in a printmaking atelier.She eventually settled in Baroda, where she taught art at Maharaja Sayajirao University.
Mohamedi was an iconoclast, whose intrinsic and essential modernist vocabulary framed a remarkable outlook on abstraction that marks one of the first non-Euro-American forays into non-representational art in post-Independence India.
She was drawn to potent influences of high modernism varying from Western existentialism, propagated by thinkers like Albert Camus; the intersection of architectural principles and the fine arts, as nurtured by Le Corbusier in his design philosophy; and visual languages of abstraction explored by artists like V.S.Gaitonde, who like Mohamedi, went against the contemporary grain by eschewing figuration.Her free-spirited nature also intimated her with influences from Sufism, Daoism and Zen aesthetics, alongside a subliminal kinship with vast expanses of the desert and traditional Islamic architecture.
Historians note that Mohamedi was intensely aware of herself and her body particularly as moving through time, and she has been known to describe her own work as getting the maximum out of the minimum.Her embrace of minimalism in art conferred well with her philosophical orientation that recognized the self’s becoming equally as its negation, and considered other-ness through consciousness and construction.
Such an unprecedented phenomenological approach – which intends to separate the self from the thinking self – resulted in a perceptual nature of phenomena and pre-occupations with whole-ness outside of cultural definition and dictation.Her diagrammatically composed drawings are constructed with enigmatic grace – marrying the functionality of the line to the spontaneity of rhythm, capable of translating the immediacy of environments by foregrounding an inner reality.Mohamedi’s deliberate yet sensual use of the line relates to geometric scales as much as music theory, and to the characteristic flutters of nature such as the stillness of air or the waves in space.Her iconic and frequent use of grids and lines in monochromatic compositions yield unique spatial environments, which grew out of a fixation with developing an individual formal vocabulary.
Alongside Mohamedi’s preferred use of ink and paper, her paintings and photographs reflect varied experiments with art as extensions of human vision and also reveal a deeply curious impetus for personal archiving, which she further attempted through extensive diary entries.
Her work has been previously exhibited at renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; the Tate Modern, London; and her first retrospective in the US at the Met Breuer, New York.
She was also the recipient of the National Award in Drawing by the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 1972.Though Mohamedi was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder, she was able to retain control of her drawing hand for a few years, casting a heartfelt impressiveness on the solidity and steadiness of her work.
She passed away in 1990, at the age of fifty-three.
From the Collection of the Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan
D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi
Preview: February 3, 2023 | 6-8 p.m.
On view until March 2, 2023
Arpita Singh
A solo exhibition by celebrated post-modernist Arpita Singh titled Meeting, featuring a curated body of drawings and canvases, on view at our modern gallery space until March 14, 2023.
Arpita Singh’s works assume new dimension as cartographical autobiographies, accenting imagined characters and landscapes with the flourish of expressionist emotion.With compositions foregrounded in movement, Singh tends to emphasize the potential of individual agency operating within collective constraints, though her mapping doesn’t seem to prioritize any one aspect – whether the fictional, mythical, personal, public fact or dream.
These almost think-scapes capture constructs of space in abstraction, whose protagonists occupy their frames implicitly and navigate time, cultures and history through an assemblage of connection.
While Singh’s symbolic mapping lends itself to a narrative reading, her intentionality is rooted in a stream-of-consciousness that expands and envelops, possesses and is possessed by its inevitable existence.
Often Singh’s everyday digestions of literature, cinema, current events appear rendered lyrically, even surrealistically, moving from cognition to layers of interpretation that extend through to viewers.The textuality of her compositions are more than gestural inclusions; they represent the linguistics of shared landscapes that resound with fragmentary, diversified, disembodied voices in a congruent symphony that overpowers the coherence of sensorial vision and logic.
Instead, by introducing observation points that are topographically flat, Singh personifies questions of beginning and belonging so pivotal to individual and collective journeys.The protagonists themselves emerge as part of the landscape, their internality in a state of flux as outlined by the world, however it is composed, at large.
Close friend of the artist and author Ella Datta writes in her introductory essay to the exhibition:
After a gap of a couple of years, Arpita comes back with a show of paintings and drawings that captures viewers’ attention.In her latest show, Meeting, consisting of oils and black and white works on paper, Arpita creates her usual magic with brush, paint, pen and ink.She presents us with glimpses of other lives in other locales […]
Arpita is a ceaseless experimenter with her language, her material, her practice.In her earlier works, she had usually foregrounded the human figure.
In this series of paintings, the figure is part of the entire scene where each element – the sky, the greenery, the water, the built spaces – contributes to a pulsating whole.Is the artist’s vision imagining a world that is not purely anthropocentric?
Title of the exhibition: Meeting
D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi
Preview: February 7, 2023 | 6-8 p.m.
On view until March 14, 2023
Jasmine Nilani Joseph
A special solo project by artist Nilani Joseph, whose collection of drawings will be on display in the viewing room at our contemporary gallery space until 2 March, including the duration of India Art Fair 2023.
Winner of the Asia Society Game Changer Awards India in 2022, Jasmine Nilani Joseph is an emerging artist from Sri Lanka, whose practice includes drawing, hybrid sculptures and animation videos.Joseph is a skilled draughtsman; she explores notions of movement and mobility in our relationships to meaningful landscapes and constructions, most often by playing with juxtapositions of positive and negative space in her compositions.
She is particularly interested in how ideas, images and objects travel across shared histories, times and cultures.
When Joseph was living in Jaffna during her childhood amidst the Sri Lankan Civil War, her parents and siblings were forced out of their home and into the city of Vavuniya, where they lived in a refugee camp and later settled under a housing scheme project.
Now with her family still living in Vavuniya, Joseph returns to Jaffna to study the arts where living alone in the city of her ancestors fills her with nostalgia and anxiety.As the wounding, displacement and distance of generational separation fills her personal life with complexity, she contemplates how the idea of family culturally develops and sustains itself.
Reflecting on the physical and emotional traumas of separation, Joseph’s latest series of drawings considers the inconclusive causes of distance – from arbitrary borders and regional wars to financial, social and economic crises.In these drawings, the central black box represents a source of darkness from which questions of belonging and security emerge, with ash-colored, concrete tones and brown-colored, soil tones – which represent the multi-perspectives of Jaffna and Vavuniya respectively – framing her visual inquisition.
In the absence of instinctive attachments, Joseph explores architectural constructions as infusions of memory, where our sensorial powers cultivate the relationships we share with our natural and constructed worlds.Joseph extends these historical narratives to the contemporary realities of the younger generation, whom she notes as living in culturally spurred states of detachment and general instability.
Also on view are Joseph’s animations from a recent body of work titled Mobile Studio, in which the artist reflects on the places she’s stayed in and moved through over recent years as she experiments with the moving textures of landscape, architecture and the living histories of places while documenting the spaces she’s maintained as her temporary studios.
Who Decides the Distance?
The Viewing Room, Vadehra Art Gallery
D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi
Preview: February 3, 2023 | 6-8 p.m.
On view until March 2, 2023
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