Looking Beyond Old

In this exhibition one sees a similar inclusive treatment of the environment and people in it as in the works of G.R. Santosh, Satish Chandra, Bikash Poddar, George Martin, Murali Nagapuzha, Shiv Lal Saroha, Tanya Mehta, Seema Kohli and Umika Mediratta. An interesting work is that of Sanjay Bhattacharya who has used the Mughal style of composition, with a hero-stone as the centre and the landscape as the background.

The alternative approach is to highlight the formal qualities of nature and present them in different styles ranging from the realism of Kaustav Jyoti Das Gupta’s sea-scapes and the flowering trees of Surya Prakash, to varying degrees of stylistic distortion in the works of Paresh Maity, Ompal Sansanwal, Shabir Hussain Santosh, Zahoor Zargar, K. Jagjit Singh, and Niranjan. J.

Beyond these we have works that make a bigger break from distortion to non-figurative expression that blends the inner feelings of the artist and the outer presence of the world of objects in the works of F.N. Souza, Jayashree Chakravarty to the urban landscapes of Praveen Kumar, Gurudas Shenoy and the relief like three dimensional constructions of Sachin George Sebastian, finally breaking away into the non-figurative works of Rajendra Dhawan, Revati Sharma Singh and Parul Sharma.

The sculptures again reflect a concern with the tree form, with or without human figures. In this respect the work of Biman B Das blends the stories of the jatakas with the crown of the tree and Dhananjay Singh bursts it like a firework, reflecting the energy of the red flowers of Surya Prakash. The essence of our art today is energetic expression that is both irreverent and original. These works reflect both these qualities as well as the capacity to produce artistic objects beyond the mere attempt to concretize expression.