Art>Terrestria​l Bodies

An aspect of contemporary Indian art is the manner in which mid career artists  have accomplished the making of (bodily) forms. Informed by Indian modernity, issues of feminism and post structural thought, they are the products of the global art residency, museum and gallery shows, and the intense activity of the Indian art scene. In their paintings and sculpture, the human body, its parts and its gestures extends into multiple spheres, of aspiration, desire and narratives of the self. The artists engagement with a rapidly globalizing India, and how she locates herself in the  growing city, are some of the sub themes.  In the process partial stories, memory and the free associations of the mind come into play.
    The artists on view represent a segment of leading artists who have emerged from different schools of thought and practice. Chittrovanu Mazumdar represents a dovetailing of late modernism with sculptural installation. He uses light, dramatic atmosphere and a theatrical mise-en-scene to stage his work. At another end of the spectrum, Shibu Natesan works in an apparently photorealist style even as he compels the viewer to search his painting and locate in it psychological meaning. Anju Dodiya?s narrative painting invariably involves aspects of her self, and set out a psychological template of womanhood. Mithu Sen who teases out shades of surreal meaning from forms, creates veiled meaning  through visual  provocation. Sen?s easy cross over between the animal and human world is echoed in the work of Jagannath Panda who completely alters scale and injects an element of imaginative play in his interpretation of the natural world. In each of the artists the narratives and readings are multiple and complex.



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Two Artists, One Vision

	The enigmatic and genre-defying work of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin "It is typical of the photographic art of van Lamsweerde and Matadin that they urge their image making to de-stabilise the pristine surfaces expected of consumer culture; to this end they make use, in turn, of the Gothic, inscrutability, androgyny, comedy, eroticism, surrealism, fantasy, montage, cinema, replication, image manipulation, Pop art, fetishism and art historical nuance." —Michael Bracewell, from the introduction Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s work has graced the walls and pages of some of the world’s finest galleries and fashion magazines, and if it is surprising that their photographs easily float between these worlds, it is by virtue of their ease in creating imagery that seeks homes in both culturally elite and mainstream outlets. For some of their photographs, such as their portrait of Bjork or campaign for Givenchy, van Lamsweerde and Matadin have worked in collaboration with the art directors M/M (Paris), who have also designed this sumptuous two-volume retrospective set that looks back at “pretty much everything” that the photographers have been working on for over two decades and has brought them to the forefront in the fields of both art and fashion.