Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road brings to life the second edition of Modus Operandi

Source Architectural Digest by Arya Chatterjee
The show embarks on creating a journey for inexperienced collectors, young or old, to buy great works of contemporary art at affordable prices. According to Gandhy, who has an eye for Indian contemporary art, some of the works featured in this exhibition were discovered after rummaging through artists’ stock rooms. A few were especially created for the show. “An artist’s studio is a sacred space not accessible to all, a place where they pursue all their inspirations. I have had the privilege of exploring these spaces and have always come out enriched and inspired by the work that I have seen,” she says. To evoke the same sense of excitement and awe for the viewer, Gandhy hopes to bridge this gap, bringing to light the process of evolution that each artist goes through in creating a work of art. Bringing something from the studios of all the featured artists—mood boards, drawing books, worktables, chairs, photographs to sculptures—Gandhy turns the gallery into a montage of various studios. The show is truly a mixture of the creative chaos that is an artist’s mind.
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With Jean Pigozzi's contemporary African art donation, MoMA to become a 'leader' in the field

Source The Art Newspaper by Nancy Kenney
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced today that the collector and photographer Jean Pigozzi was donating a “transformative” gift of 45 works of contemporary African art to the museum, positioning MoMA to become a “unique institutional leader” in the field. Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director, said in a statement that the gift would play an important role in the ambitious re-installation of MoMA’s permanent collection, which is taking shape as the institution prepares to reopen on 21 October in expanded galleries. The museum has cast the rehanging as an opportunity to rethink the entire history of Modern and contemporary art, highlighting and juxtaposing artists of more diverse backgrounds and geographic origins.
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It is extremely urgent that the Indian art community reaches out to local audiences: Shanay Jhaveri

Source The Hindustan Times by Srishti Jha
In April 2016, I joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art as its first incumbent curator for Modern and Contemporary art from South Asia and immediately proposed Mukherjee’s show. The Museum’s Modern and Contemporary department under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff has been committed to reconsidering a received art history. This has manifested in our exhibition programme as well as our collecting approach. The Met Breuer was inaugurated with a solo show of Nasreen Mohamedi and since then Modern and Contemporary Art from South Asia has been consistently represented at the Museum. Mohamedi set the pace and spirit for the programme. I felt that Mukherjee would be the right artist to follow Mohamedi, with a solo retrospective at The Met Breuer; they are two artists occupying the furthest ends of the artistic spectrum in their visual idiom, particularly in relation to the breadth of the modernity projects cultivated and nurtured in and through Baroda.
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Non-stop Rain Room at Sharjah Art Foundation

Source Indian Blooms
The Rain Room is an unusual and evocative experience for visitors who will enjoy the sound and nearby feel of being in the rain without getting wet. When visitors enter the room, they are directed to navigate intuitively and carefully through the dark underground space in order to protect themselves from the downpour. As the visitors walk through the room, which uses 1,200 liters of self-cleaning, recycled water, their movements trigger motion sensors that pauses the rainfall when detecting movement. Founded in 2005, Random International is a London-based collaborative studio for experimental and digital practice within contemporary art. Their work, which includes sculpture, performance and large-scale architectural installations, reflects the relationship between man and machine and centres on audience interaction.
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On Ravinder Reddy’s first one-man exhibition in Kolkata

Source The Hindu by Soumitra Das
The gopurams or pyramidal towers of South Indian temples bristle with thousands of figures of deities. Rural deities or grama devatas, occasionally stark naked, are the guardians of villages in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. G. Ravinder Reddy strips these figures of their divinity and turns them into icons of working women of our times, transformed in his imagination into empowered goddesses who can hold their own, irrespective of class and social status.
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Delhi art lovers do not miss out on this exhibition at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Source The New Indian Express
If you haven’t caught the big fat retrospective exhibition of one of India’s leading woman contemporary artists, Arpita Singh at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (DLF South Court Mall, Saket), you have till July 14. About 180 works by the 82-year-old Delhi-based artist have been curated by Roobina Karode in the show titled Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There. Singh who hails from Baranagar in Kolkata, graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959. In 1972, she had her first solo exhibition at Kunika Chemould Gallery, New Delhi.
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A Tribal Tradition Under Threat

Source Raw Vision by Deidi von Schaewen
The Adivasi tradition of house painting is centuries old; some say, it is rooted in prehistoric rock art. Passed from generation to generation, mothers and aunts to daughters and nieces, the practice occurs across the region’s different tribes, such as the Oraons, Santals, Mundas, Ganjs and Kurmis. There are a dozen or so different styles of house painting, but within those styles the murals are personal to the tribe and to the artist, variations even occurring from house to house. The Adivasi consider their homes to be sacred, and daubing their walls with art is an expression of faith, identity, culture, pride, family, love, thanks and more.
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Indian Art and Culture: The book ‘A Conjuror’s Archive’ pays an ode to artist Jangarh Singh Shyam

Source Architectural Digest by Avantika Shankar
Jangarh would recreate the world of the stories he grew up with—a world so distant from the modernist art school he was studying in—and in that sense, created a contemporaneity of his own. “Modernism cannot be confined to certain movements in modernism,” muses Dr. Jain, “He has also done a couple of autobiographical works—tribal artists don’t do that. Where would you place this interaction? It is a kind of modernity. His marginalisation, his coming away from the tradition to which he belonged, his recreating that entire world of imagination…to surpass all other art school-trained artists who were around him…” Dr. Jain explains. “There are modern artists who continue to do what they’re doing, in some way or the other, and that isn’t innovation.” Jangarh Singh, on the other hand, was perpetually throwing himself into new forms—from using poster colours for the first time at age 18 to using architectural forms as his canvas—and the continued relevance of his work is a testament to his revolutionary mind. “If modernity comes from being open to new things, imbibing them in your work…” Dr. Jain says, “I think he was able to do that all the time.”
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Prabhakar Barwe, the Jacques Derrida of Indian modernism

Source National Herald by Vibha Galhotra
In the scorching heat of Delhi, while all seemed grumpy and dull, walking into the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) changed the pace of my day. The cool breeze of the gallery along with the experience of space, colour, form and poetry, as I entered the retrospective exhibition ‘Astitva: The Essence of Prabhakar Barwe,’ brought back a different sense of fulfillment. A forgotten hero of modernist, pre-contemporary art movement in India, Prabhakar Barwe (1936 – 1995), was much ahead of his time and was widely appreciated by his peers and seniors for his unique sense of depiction and his concern with the language of painting rather than visual images and signs. Given his attention to detail, it goes without saying that Barwe was quite analytical of his work and constantly seeking deep meaning through experimentation with colour and form. His style and process somehow reminds me of the concept of deconstruction introduced by philosopher Jacques Derrida who explored the interplay between language and the construction of meaning in search of learning about the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text. Similarly, Barwe was trying find newer realities created by abstracting an image from its real form. In one of his notes Barwe mentions, “The interplay between concrete and abstract is my prime preoccupation. It gives me immense pleasure to work on that meeting point to that thin line of demarcation, where abstraction meets the concrete or separates from it.”
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