Gurcharan Das On How He Set Up One Of India's Earliest Corporate Art Collections

Source Mid-Day by Benita Fernando
"Tyeb's works aren't figurative. He looks at form, and the Diagonal series is an interesting way to break up space and colour," says Das, 74. Das' interest in modern and contemporary art can be traced back to his days as a student in Harvard, where he graduated in Philosophy, but was exposed to various other subjects, including art and architecture. Musing that he nearly thought of becoming an architect, Das joined Richardson Hindustan Limited (RHL) as a trainee in then-Bombay in the 1960s. "I would look longingly at paintings in galleries such as Chemould and Pundole's. My interest sort of grew from there," says Das.
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Celebrating diversity

Source The New Indian Express
Contemporary art in South Asia is creating more buzz now than it ever had. Art is a product of history and culture; two forces that form the context of the artist’s identity and evolution. Some of the world’s most populated countries are in South Asia, home to transitional societies and their lore. The Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW) is an effort to portray their diversity and uniqueness on a single vast canvas consisting of hundreds of other canvases that bear the imprints of the region’s creative gestalt. In its second edition, DCAW is generating discourse that befits the shifting lens of au courant trends. Seven galleries in the city—Blueprint 12, Gallery Espace, Exhibit 320, Latitude 28, Nature Morte, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery—are spearheading the new wave.
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Building Blocks: Talk of the Town

Source The Indian Express by Shiny Varghese
Jehangir Art Gallery could possibly be Mumbai’s grande dame of galleries. It was built when a need was felt to promote a national movement in contemporary visual arts. With its cantilevered portico, and modern yet classical architectural plan, it was the talk of the town. In the 1950s, two major artists’ collectives — Progressive Artists Group and Bombay Group — were at their prime. But there was no proper gallery to showcase work. Sir Cowasji Jehangir, a patron of the arts, was keen on a gallery that would promote artists both from India and abroad. MIT-trained architect Durga Shankar Bajpai, who designed the gallery, gave the RCC (reinforced cement concrete) structure an auditorium hall and an exhibition gallery. Sensitive and down-to-earth, Bajpai, fresh from his experience of working with Finnish architect-designer Alvar Aalto, brought both simplicity and technical experimentation to the work.
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Indian Art Comes Home

Source Mid-Day by Dhara Vora Sabnani
India's living traditions of folk and indigenous art are now finding takers among the country's art collectors. So how do you pick the right piece of high value? In 2001, while at an artist residency at Mithila Museum in the Niigata Prefecture in Japan, contemporary Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam from Madhya Pradesh hanged himself without leaving a note. Shyam was working on a salary of Rs 12,000 a month for the museum, a sum paid for his works that were sold at a much higher rate. Had Shyam been alive today, it would have been a proud moment for the genius, as one of his untitled pieces was sold for Rs 8.35 lakh at Saffronart's Living Traditions: Folk and Tribal Art auction in March 2016.
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AVANT-GARDE AESTHETES: JAGDIP JAGPAL’S ARTISTS TO WATCH OUT FOR

Source Verve by Tina Dastur and Preksha Sharma
In the second part of our series, the director and re-inventor of the Indian Art Fair, curates a list of nine, innovative multi-disciplinary artists.
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ARTIST AND COVER GIRL RITHIKA MERCHANT’S FANTASTICAL WORLD

Source Verve Magazine by Skye Arundhati Thomas
In the early 2000s, Indian contemporary art made a turn for the conceptual. Many artists had seen great commercial success, but after the boom period ended, the market stagnated, collectors dwindled, and many galleries were forced to close down. The boom years were full of incredible stories: for instance, some galleries would estimate prices of the works on display by square footage. To understand the contemporary moment in the Indian art scene today, it is important to look back and see what the market now favours in relation to its past. When asked about the changing nature of the arts today, and whether she finds it to be more democratic than years previous, she says, “I think people still view art as highbrow because it costs a lot to own it. The price of a work can immediately create a barrier between the viewer and the object, because it is then seen as a luxury item.”
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My ideas run through my head like a film reel: Veteran artist Madhavi Parekh

Source Business Standard
"Women have always been artists, and there always have been glimpses of women's art within male-driven societies. Earlier, many women were kept from pursuing a general education, let alone arts training." However, she highlights the gradually changing landscape and says women have started to speak about the issues they face through art. To that extent, the retrospective, accompanied by an exhaustive book on the artist, seeks to understand, contextualise and place her contribution within the larger context of Indian modern art.
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TRACING THE SOURCE

Source Verve by Madhu Jain
In an exhibition currently on at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, there is a startling image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa dressed in a rather drab communist worker’s uniform, her hair covered with a worker’s cap, painted by Roman Cieslewicz. Marcel Duchamp will be eternally remembered for the urinal he hung on a wall, as well as for mischievously painting a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa, decades earlier. It was just a joke for him, but this work joined the canon of art history soon enough. While Manjunath Kamath’s witty and digital collages yoked mythological figures into contemporary spaces and plonked them together with people of our times, a few Indian artists have played around with Raja Ravi Varma’s portraits. Rohit Chawla photographed women dressed as characters from the works of the 19th-century painter. Indian painters are also rummaging through the country’s folk and tribal art, as well as sculptures of various centuries, ancient murals and miniatures to source imagery, colours and forms — and in search of inspiration and a different pictorial vocabulary. Not least of all vibrancy.
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Before Midnight

Source The Indian Express by Pooja Pillai
Ruia explains that the backgrounds, in most of these collages, were made by women painters in Nathdwara, who would produce such backgrounds as a way of supplementing their income. These backgrounds were in keeping with the traditions of painting that had developed in the region over the centuries, although the contents that were eventually pasted on them brought in a distinct contemporary flavour. “The artists who made these collages were using their works to disseminate information about what was unfolding across the larger canvas of the country,” says Ruia.
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DAG's latest show -- a retrospective of Madhvi Parekh's works

Source DAG Mumbai
Spanning five decades of her painterly career, this retrospective includes iconic works by Madhvi Parekh which represent every phase of her illustrious career. The show also includes rare drawings and paintings from the 1960s, when the influence of Paul Klee’s abstraction on her early work was evident. Given the solid representation of Madhvi’s paintings from every decade, the exhibition allows viewers to see the continuity in her vision and focus. Providing a bridge between the urban and the rural through an impressive body of work, Madhvi, art historians and critics strongly believe, is one of the more uniquely talented women artists of Indian modern art. As someone who has begun to be seriously collected in recent years, the timing of the artist’s first ever retrospective is apt. DAG acknowledges Madhvi’s importance as an artist who deserves her position in the pantheon of Indian modernism for her painterly resolve to stick to her own language and oeuvre as a folk style modernist in the face of more conventional art making.
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Mysterious Box of Photographs Inspires a Globe-Trotting Art Show

Source Chicago Tonight by Marc Vitali
In 1945, an American soldier stationed in India took a series of photographs depicting everyday life in West Bengal. Nearly sixty years later, curators Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller discovered a box filled with these photographs at a Chicago-area estate sale. Zbiral and Teller traced the box back to West Bengal and invited a group of Indian artists to respond to the photographs. Following the Box is an innovative contemporary art exhibition featuring painting, film, graphic illustration, and folk art, as well as multimedia and conceptual art. Each work draws inspiration from the original photographs, exploring the elusive nature of memory, political and military histories, and cultural identity.
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