Fair assessment at the India Art Fair

Five artists whose works you can’t miss at the ongoing India Art Fair

As the India Art Fair 2020 unravels, Delhi has become an art hub, where artworks from across the world are jon display, inviting discussions of varying merit. Mediums, materials, metaphors and moods – the Fair promises to hold something for everyone.

Amongst 75 galleries at the Fair, we pick five artists whose works must be gleaned upon for their practice in terms of spontaneity and versatile handling of composition, contour and the quaintness of subject in a world obsessed with the internet and technology.

The works articulate an artistic language that lives beyond the moment because perception and representation go hand in hand.

Ganesh Pyne: Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa

The late Modern Master Ganesh Pyne’s pen and ink drawings at Aakriti Gallery’s booth bring alive his grandmother’s stories in 10 illustrations that were commissioned for a book in 1982. Pyne recreates anthologies written by iconic writers of Bengali literature. He showcases the illustrations for “Shotoborsher Roopkatha” — 100 years of fairy tales. The authors include Rabindranath Tagore, Ishwar Chandra Vidya Sagar and Sunil Gangopadhyay.

His pen and ink drawings are riveting and resonant, they are shaped from his own experiences of solitude, alienation, pain, horror, and moods of tenderness and serenity experienced in his childhood. When he illustrates “Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa” there is the inkling of observation and memory and the power of nostalgia.

At times, these images are offshoots of ideas while his grandmother narrated stories to him in the thick of night or monsoon months. The lines are bold, and precise, and create a controlled alchemy of characters and emotion. The drawings that emerge are potent both in form and content. Stripped of colour, they convey an architectonic quality in the structuring of the imagery – we also understand his perfection in scale and gesture.

Meera Mukherjee: Fiery Nataraja

Sculptor Meera Mukherjee once said, “To my mind every artist must also be an artisan, who brings to his work a devotion which moves him through the progress of his work,” Mukherjee passed away in 1998 after a life of incredible sculptural explorations. She believed that true sculpting could only happen when a sculptor dips into her roots in the hope of finding modernist modes.

Meera Mukherjee’s 1995 bronze at the Akar Prakar booth is a delight for the tired eyes. It has tribal threads of rustic rhythms. It evokes the scene of Lord of the Dance. The Anandatandava, the frenzy and iconic appeal coalesce to create a Nataraja. She uses the economy of attributes by giving us four hands like the Chola bronzes of the past but keeps the two feet planted solidly on the ground. We must imagine Nataraja’s right hand raised in the reassuring abhayamudra and left hand in gajahasta, indicating the defeat of ignorance that hinders the realisation of the universal truth. We can see how Mukherjee stretched her forms well beyond the rules set by the classical Chola tradition, as if telling her viewers to extend their imagination just like she did.

L N Tallur: Untitled

Sculptor and installation artist L N Tallur loves drawing the crowds in and wants us to gape at his works with awe in the Chemould Prescott booth. Ever since his days at M.S.University Baroda, he has developed a keen interest in the relationship between viewer and museum object and explored whacky, ingenuous interactive processes.

L.N. Tallur’s work at India Art Fair  

On exhibit is his installation of a uniquely-designed Apasmara set between printed dental plaster evoking the museum object but inviting inquisitiveness from the viewer who will be in a dilemma. Tallur calls it floccinaucinihilipilification -it is a prototype for an idea. “Yesterday, it was antique, when it goes under the microscope, you get a beautiful pattern – I have printed that pattern on the sculptures. So here, micro and macro both are seen together. This is a test of an idea, so I don’t know if it is worthless or worthwhile. I want the viewer to be part of the journey of contradictions and they should either be amused or shocked or provoked to think,” says Tallur.

The viewer will be compelled to touch this didactic work, the little dwarf almost squeezed between the spaces and the folds. In addition to the engaging conceptual and humorous aspects in this work, Tallur balances fine craftsmanship and with compelling aesthetics cocks an eye on historians and antiquities in museums and the art of the subjectivity

Nityan Unnikrishnan: Untitled

An untitled work by Nityan Unnikrishnan at the ongoing India Art Fair  

At the Chatterjee & Lal booth is a stirring portrait of a bespectacled man with grey hair, his gaze is one that probes, provokes and asks you to stop and gaze back. Nityan Unnikrishnan, an NID Graduate and a mid-career artist, paints an urban scape teeming with people in the background, while the grey haired gentleman in the check shirt takes centre stage.

Amongst his crowd of humans, we can sense quirky men and women, detailed with the minutiae of dense domesticity. A powerful observation and the skill to create multiple images of city life are obvious in his work. The silver-haired man seems strangely familiar. His work grabs your attention for its slice of surrealism as well as his ability to present a visual that could belong to any of India’s cities teeming with cosmopolitan crowds. His penchant for perfecting the figurative idiom and weaving in satirical commentaries keep his works refreshing .

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Anjan Modak: Untitled

An untitled work by Anjan Modak
 

Amongst emerging artists, Anjan Modak is a discovery. His fragile figurative works dance before your eyes. At Emami Art, Modak’s works echo the evanescent, the ephemeral and the evocative. He steeps his figurative works with quasi-abstract elements, and satire. His images are talking to us about conspicuous consumption. In a subtle way, he signifies brands and status and gaps between the rich and the poor.

Disturbances between classes of society and people and the superficial vagaries of society all come into play in these facile human forms that seem both surreal and modernist in moorings of expression. Rich in texture, the blend of graphite and watercolour give us an overlay of rare fantasy – here is a dreamy world full of thorns and tribulations.

(The India Art Fair runs until February 2, 2020, at NSIC Grounds, New Delhi)

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