Indian artists engender discussion in a market where 'buying' has been a positive index.
It's May, temperatures are warming up all over and contemporary Indian art is hot again. In art capitals - London, New York and Hong Kong - artists of Indian and Chinese origin have been performing exceedingly well on the "Buy" index from an art investor's standpoint.
The traditional and the modern are getting popular again and collectors and galleries are watching the art market with cautious optimism. At Aicon Gallery in New York an interesting art discussion examined the point of convergence and intellectual synergy between the Western Modernist avant-garde movement and Indian indigenous and tribal folk art.
Works from late artists Jamini Roy (1887-1972) and Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994) were among the displays. Originally from Bankura in West Bengal, Roy studied at Government School of Art in 1903 in what was then Calcutta. He was initially drawn to the Post-Impressionist genre of landscapes and portraits and when he was 38, Roy moved to pop bazaar art that was sold outside the Kalighat temple. He used to follow Van Gogh and Paul Cezanne before he went more individualistic. By 1930, he switched to indigenous materials using woven mats, cloth and wood coated with lime as his media.
Roy's Bengali folk paintings are well-known and among his favourite subjects were religious Hindu and Christian themes as also tribal Santhals in rural West Bengal. His St. Ann and the Blessed Virgin and Radha-Krishna themes were equally popular. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1955.
Simla-born Swaminathan was more multi-faceted initially in his career in that he tried to dabble in medicine, politics, writing and art till he settled down as an artist. He was with the Communist Party in 1948 and in 1966, published a magazine - Contra - with Mexican poet and Ambassador to India, Octavio Paz challenging then existent views of modernity through articles on art and aesthetics.
Marrying his wife Bhawani in 1955 was a steadying influence evidently for soon Swaminathan excelled as an artist and a writer of children's stories. Known for his simplistic imagery, Swaminathan's mastery of poignant space reflected an absence of clutter and a clinical portrayal of his thoughts. Swaminathan studied art in Delhi and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. During 1968-70, he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship for work on a project titled, The Significance of the Traditional Numen in Contemporary Art.
(A New York based independent trend writer, Raj S. Rangarajan reports on the art market and auto shows, reviews books and films for media based in New York; Toronto, Canada; Seoul and India.)
No comments:
Post a Comment