Browsing: Art

Contemporary Indian art, antiquities from South Asia & noted artists from India and Pakistan.

Art

Calcutta was once known as ‘City of Palaces’ and in the days of the British Raj there were opulent buildings built by the rulers as well as the Bengal elite. Today many of these grand structures are in decay and a passionate chronicler of these disappearing stories is Prabir C. Purkayastha, award-winning photojournalist who tells evocative tales through his camera.
Purkayastha was recently in New York where the Sundaram Tagore Gallery showcased Stories in Stone: Colonial Calcutta, images which tell the story of grand edifices in decline.

Read More
Art

Art is often about aesthetics and beauty but in Chittaprosad’s work it was about the ugliness of life and the horrors of the Bengal famine. This retrospective of Chittaprosad’s work is a not to be missed event for it illuminates the life of a little known artist whose searing body of work is being seen for the first time in New York.

Read More
Art

Narasimha, the mighty God Vishnu in his half man-half lion avatar, sits with his frontal arms relaxed in meditation, his two rear arms bearing the chakra disc and the conch shell, which is now missing. Around his tautly crossed legs one is amazed to find a yogapatta – or yoga strap!
For many contemporary practitioners of yoga who consider the yoga strap to be a part of their daily routine in a studio, this brilliantly executed Chola period bronze sculpture is an eye-opener. It shows that not only did yoga originate in India but goes all the way back to the Hindu gods.

Read More
Art

The gallery at the Rubin Museum in Manhattan is hushed with silent screams, copious tears, with catastrophic events as they happened, with real life receding into the realm of the past. Witnesses from the present watch as Mahatma Gandhi lies fasting, shrinking into himself with concerned followers all around him; they watch hundreds huddled on the refugee trains from Pakistan to India; they are at Gandhi’s funeral with inconsolable masses flooding the landscape.

Read More
Art

‘From Today I have No Future’ – A solo show by M. Pravat at Aicon Gallery in Manhattan is almost a blueprint for loss, life and living – it is about streetscapes and mindscapes, of memories and the past but also about re-imagination, and new layerings added to the scaffolding of what we remember.

Read More
Art

Some of the most poignant testimony of a culture in flux is Thomas Kelly’s ethnographic work of marginalized, landless communities. He has lived with the Badi people where the young women have had to sell themselves to keep their families out of poverty. Once they were singers and dancers and entertainers at weddings and other ceremonies – now these women have to use their bodies as a source of income.

Using a Gates grant, Kelly looked into the lives of fallen angels in various parts of Asia, from ‘maalish’ or massage boys in hotels to sex worker communities, analyzing what drove them to this work and how they could be helped by the organizations.

Read More
Art

The Metropolitan Museum Of Art & India’s Ministry of Culture have renewed for five years the two-way partnerships with Indian museums for sharing knowledge and expertise.So over the next five years there will be 35 new fellowships; annual seminars and workshops in India; follow-up visits by host supervisors at fellows’ home institutions; visits by the directors of the participating Indian museums to the fellows’ host institutions; and meetings of the advisory committee to organize and plan seminars, workshops, and interviews.

Read More
Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is the city’s largest art museum, has always been New York’s crown jewel. Now along with its iconic Fifth Avenue space and the Cloisters, it has a new avatar, Met Breuer (pronounced Broy-er) on Madison Avenue.

Read More
Art

In this exhibition you get to see the unclothed form in all its avatars – sensual, erotic, aged, sorrowing, even in anguish. The nudes takes many forms, with inspiration drawn from the ancient sculptures, bazaar pin-up calendars as well as those done by many artists of nude models in their early years as part of their art school training.

Read More
Art

We talk of today’s India as a great global power and of its international trade and cosmopolitan nature, but all this was already happening in India’s Deccan Plateau in the 16th and 17th centuries where, drawn by the access to port cities, diverse immigrants, merchants, mercenaries and missionaries from different parts of the world had landed, lured by the riches of India.

Read More
Art

Yes, it’s that time of the year when Asian art takes over New York City and art-lovers from all over the world come to the Big Apple. Just before Asia Week opened (March 13 -21) I spent a day with a group of bloggers and journalists in hot pursuit of hidden treasures.

Read More
Art

The images are searing. Images of children who’ve lost their innocence, their childhood in the harsh world of bonded labor. Their eyes stare back at you without emotion, their lips frozen in a non-smile. This is art but art painted with the colors of true life. Each image by British portraitist Claire Phillips is of a real child, a child slave rescued by Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi’s organization, Bachpan Bachao Andolan. Meet the artist who journeyed to India to document the lives of these children.

Read More
Art

Sometimes entire worlds disappear yet art survives and tells us the stories which would have remained untold. Fabulous life-sized images of Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, and a pantheon of Hindu Gods have been unearthed in Southeast Asia and they look not quite like the deities as we know them in India. The features seem Southeast Asian, the headgear is different but there is no doubt as to their Supreme Power. Though the inspiration is Indian, local aesthetics and local artists have given these vibrant, exquisite masterpieces of Hindu and Buddhist icons a flavor all their own.

For the first time, the cream of the cream of the treasures have been gathered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: – ‘Lost Kingdoms – Hindu Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia’ which brings to light this long-forgotten world.

Read More
Art

This mesmerizing image by the artist Anil Revri is called Ram Darwaza – and you wonder why.
“These works pay homage to my mother. A leading exponent of the classical Indian Dance forms of Bharat Natyam and Kuchipudi she had, in her final days, expressed a great desire to be able to enter into one of my geometric compositions, and, accompanied by Lord Rama, dance her way into the distant horizon.”
This painting has just been acquired by the Asian Art Museum in Berlin.

Read More
Art

“These sadhus are like a living question that people have forgotten to ask,” says noted photographer Thomas Kelly. “Their painted bodies confront us with essential questions at the heart of existence…provoking the questions, ‘Who am I?’ ‘What do I need?’ ‘What is really important?’”

So as we ponder this, we can take a stroll through the beautiful Rubin Museum of Art situated in frenzied Manhattan and see how the sadhus are trying to make sense of the world.

I’m always intrigued by the fact that this gorgeous museum devoted to the soul and to spirituality was once a highly materialistic shopping heaven – Barneys! Now to walk through it is like being in a temple of peace, and each of us is free to find our own path to salvation.

Read More
Art

Bollywood may be loved by the frontbenchers in Indian cinema halls but it has friends in high places too – the elite world of contemporary art. There is just something about the surreal, over-the-top world of masala films and item dance numbers that strikes a chord in the more rarified world of contemporary Indian art.

A new show ‘Cinephiliac’ at Twelve Gates Art in Philadelphia, PA, checks out this phenomenon with the work of emerging as well as noted artists, a creative dialogue between art and film. This new exhibition reinforces these influences and shows the work of both Indian and Pakistani artists, for the effect of Bollywood cheekily crosses borders and permeates different cultures.

Read More
Art

“What I find remarkable is that miniature painting is so intrinsic to Indian art history but it seems as though Indian artists and Indian art schools have decided to be just colonized by the West and Western art traditions instead,” says Olivia Fraser.
” All the most important Western-born twentieth century art movements: cubism, abstractionism, modernism, post-modernism have been successfully encouraged and developed here but miniature painting has been relegated to the dusty shelf of ‘craft’ – something that is stuck in the aspic of tradition and has no developmental, political or aesthetic possibility of change.”

Read More