Early painting by Bhupen Khakhar makes auction debut at Bonhams

Source ArtDaily
Residency Bungalow, an important early work by Bhupen Khakhar, leads Bonhams’ Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sale on Tuesday 6 June in New Bond Street, London. Painted in 1969, the work was exhibited at the 1969 Sao Paulo Biennale before being acquired by a private American Collection in the early 1970s, where it has remained ever since. The work has an estimate of £250,000-350,000. Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003) played a central role in modern Indian art and was recognised for his unique figurative style and incisive observations of class and sexuality. He often explored openly homosexual themes at a time when it was not generally addressed within India, and celebrated the day-to-day lives of the common man. An accountant turned self-taught artist, who came to painting quite late in life as a member of the Baroda Group, Khakhar approached his work with humour, attentiveness, and a boldness which gained him a reputation as ‘India's first Pop artist.’ In 2016 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in London. His work is included in major galleries and private collections across the world.
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Dayanita Singh Dancing with my camera

Source 9Lives Magazine
Depuis quatre décennies, Dayanita Singh (1961, New Delhi) développe une œuvre qui se distingue par la manière dont elle brouille les genres et explore les limites du médium photographique. Dancing with my Camera, qui constitue la plus importante exposition dédiée à l’artiste indienne à ce jour, parcourt l’ensemble de son œuvre, depuis son premier projet photographique consacré à l’univers musical du percussionniste indien Zakir Hussain (1951, Bombay) jusqu’à ses œuvres les plus récentes, parmi lesquelles Let’s See (2021), inspirée de la forme des planches contacts. Témoignant de l’invention formelle qui caractérise l’œuvre de Singh, l’exposition met également en valeur le regard singulier qu’elle porte sur des thèmes tels que l’archive, la musique, la danse, l’architecture, la disparition, le genre ou encore l’amitié.
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Interview: Mithu Sen centres “lingual anarchy” to question institutions and the art market

Source Art Guide Australia by Amelia Winata
The title of the exhibition alludes to the more primal and corporeal relationship we have with language, through our bodies. I present it as an invitation and a provocation to abandon our known languages, and, instead, reflect on unintelligible and unknown languages to search for our common denominators. For me, language is a sign of imposed cultural differences, and English, a reminder of colonial dominance. Over two decades, I have identified an uncodified subconscious language through visual and performative practices, which I call “un-language”. It is the primary material around which everything revolves. In this vein, the exhibition also elaborates on tropes and tools of identity and communication that I have used over the years, primarily the use of first-person singular to command an agency for my voice and complicating the guest-host relationship through radical hospitality, which in this case is exacerbated by me being an artist from the global south in Australia.
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Partition - Partage

Source E-flux
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) today presents an architectural model of its new building. Designed by renowned Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye in collaboration with S. Ghosh & Associates as local architect of record, it is set to be India’s largest cultural centre when it opens in Delhi in 2026. An installation showcasing the model is presented as part of the Curator’s Special Projects at the 18th International Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko and coincides with the breaking ground of the new museum in New Delhi. It responds to “Mnemonic,” the theme of Curator’s Special Projects’ section in the Arsenale and includes works from the museum’s collection by major Indian artists Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009), Zarina (1937–2020) and Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990). This is accompanied by Touch AIR (2023), a film by contemporary filmmaker Amit Dutta. The museum’s collection of over 10,000 modern and contemporary works draws on the region’s rich cultural history. The new location, covering over 100,000 square metres, will be located on the National Highway (NH8) in Delhi, near the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
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Art and revolution: Vivan Sundaram, an artist whose work captured the turmoil of contemporary times

Source Scroll.In by Sujata Prasad
His political orientation took a dramatic turn during the 1968 anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a revolutionary Trotskyite organisation. At his memorial meeting held in Delhi on April 17, Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik spoke about the massive rally at the Grosvenor Square where he and Sundaram were both present. They marched with Pakistani-British activist and writer Tariq Ali from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Street to Grosvenor Square where English actor Vanessa Redgrave made a surprise appearance. The espousal of radical Left politics across university campuses in the US, and in Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Warsaw, Belgrade and Czechoslovakia – where tanks rolled to silence the Prague Spring, the strike of workers’ demanding better working conditions – and the virulent contestation of everyday reality left its impact on the sixty-eighters. The paroxysms of the 1968 student politics continued to reverberate in Sundaram’s life. He lived in a commune with friends, incubating an emotional hunger for social transformation. He returned to India in 1970 after hitchhiking across North America, Europe, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan – drawing acclaim almost immediately when his ink drawings of the Heights of Macchu Picchu, based on poet Pablo Neruda’s 12-poem sequence were displayed.
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Arpana Caur – An empathetic activist artist

Source Indica News by Sonia Dhami
Amongst the multiple reasons of the heart and mind, which draw me time and again to return to my motherland, is to get to meet Arpana Caur. Despite her exalted position as one of India’s leading contemporary artists, she always maintains a humble and modest demeanor. As my friend and I entered the beautiful red brick building, she received us with her trademark warmth and love and took us up to her studio on the fourth floor, which opens onto an expansive terrace. Amidst the call of the peacocks and birds flying in the skies above, we marveled over the dense tree cover surrounding Siri Fort Auditorium. Arpana explained to us the legal battles that she & her mother, the celebrated author Ajeet Cour, have had to fight to keep the authorities from brutally cutting down these very trees just to make way for the ubiquitous modern malls and restaurants, one sees sprouting unchecked in towns over India. Arpana’s life has been fuelled by activism around the many causes she & her mother have taken up. Whether it is filing legal cases to fight for protecting the environment or distributing blankets to the needy, or running vocational training courses for poor students or exhibiting art –folk, contemporary & miniature, in their in four in house art galleries, the mother-daughter duo have freely given of their time, resources and above all love.
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In Captivating Animations, Nalini Malani Builds Feminist Visions of Justice

Source Artsy by Ayanna Dozier
Over the past 50 years, Nalini Malani has captivated audiences with her feminist mythological landscapes across animations and large-scale media installations. Born in 1946 in Karachi (which was then part of pre-partition India, and is now Pakistan), the artist had her early beginnings in the 1960s experimental film and video movement in India. There, she was a participant in Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), the experimental artist workshop in Bombay (Mumbai) led by artist Akbar Padamsee. Throughout her practice, Malani challenges narratives and foregrounds women’s rights, influenced by her experience with colonialism and migration following the partition of India. This is partly influenced by her experience watching many of her female peers get married and give up their artistic practices. “Many of my [female] colleagues in the art school were lost to matrimony,” she told Artsy. “I’m sorry to say that we lost really great artists to marriage.”
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Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE

Source Australian Art Reviews
Continuing the annual ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, a new exhibition of work by leading New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen will open on 22 April 2023. Mithu Sen (b. 1971) was born in West Bengal, and is one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists, with a prolific body of work recognised through awards, exhibitions, and performances at prestigious forums across the globe. Mithu Sen explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional. Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world.
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Vivan Sundaram, 79, Dies; a Pivotal, and Political, Figure in Indian Art

Source The New York Times by Holland Cotter
Vivan Sundaram, an artist and activist widely credited with spearheading a transition in modern and contemporary Indian art from European-inspired abstract painting to multimedia forms addressing social and political realities in his country, died ‌on ‌March 29 in New Delhi‌. He was 79. The cause was a brain hemorrhage following a long illness, said Esa Epstein, a curator who, with Sepia International, organized two of Mr. Sundaram’s United States exhibitions. The product of a comfortably elite upbringing (he described it as “colonial”) in northern India, Mr. Sundaram studied art at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara), then enrolled in the Slade School of London in 1966 on a scholarship. The four years he spent in England changed his life.
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Une publication partagée par Gallery Maskara (@gallerymaskara)

Caste-pital

Source E-flux Journal by Sajan Mani
I begin this oral history with Dalit social reformer Poykayil Appachan, born in 1879 in Kerala, India. An upper-caste family enslaved him from birth. Although this family was Syrian Christian, not Hindu (India’s castes originate in Hinduism), the fact of their religion did not shield Poykayil from the terrors of slavery. The reality of the caste system in India is one that encompasses everyone and everything. Christianity, too, has actively reproduced the mechanism of caste. Poykayil worked in the enslavers’ fields from a young age. While laboring there one day, he found a human skeleton. His response was to start singing. He sang with deep pain about the plight of his grandparents, who were killed in those same fields. Caste slavery used up the bodies of human beings who were compelled to plough the fields like bulls. Poykayil’s song was never written down anywhere, but has survived through oral practice.
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Vivan Sundaram (1943–2023)

Source Artforum
Pathbreaking artist and activist Vivan Sundaram, who transformed the landscape of Indian contemporary art, died March 29 in New Delhi following a brain hemorrhage. He was seventy-nine. Through a practice that encompassed installation, photography, illustration, sculpture, video, and painting, Sundaram investigated social and political themes as well as those relating to popular culture and to issues surrounding perception, memory, and history. A great believer in communication and collaboration across practices, Sundaram was of the opinion that art could effect social change. Vivan Sundaram was born in Shimla, India, in 1943. His father was Kalyan Sundaram, a civil servant and independent India’s first law secretary and second chief election commissioner; his mother was Indira Sher-Gil, the sister of pioneering painter Amrita Sher-Gil.
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This Dior exhibition in Mumbai celebrates the visionary talent of Indian artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh

Source Architectural Digest by Gautami Reddy
“Not many know this but Christian Dior was a gallerist before he was a designer,” shares Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior’s women’s collection, who commissioned a series of paintings by the legendary Indian artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh to be transformed into monumental embroidered backdrops for Dior’s 2022 Spring-Summer runway show in Paris. “The runway show only lasted 10 minutes, but these masterpieces will continue to live on and be celebrated for their representation of the power of Indian art, culture and creativity,” Chiuri adds at the opening of Mul Mathi, an exclusive Dior exhibition in Mumbai, which brings the 22 tapestries seen at the Paris show to India for the first time, accompanied by a selection of paintings by Madhvi and Manu Parekh that inspired the project.
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At the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Isha Ambani Piramal’s Art House proudly champions India’s emerging artists

Source Vogue India by Sadaf Shaikh
Last evening, at the launch of the much-talked-about Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, photographers were veritably disoriented from turning their cameras this way and that as celebrities descended on the red-in-spirit-but-actually-green carpet in droves. Borrowing from the unique South Asian idiosyncrasy of cultural plurality, Sangam/Confluence, the opening show co-curated by American curator Jeffrey Deitch and leading Indian cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, will showcase works by Indian artists Bharti Kher, Bhupen Khakhar, Ranjani Shettar, Ratheesh T and Shantibai, who shed the shackles of form and medium to devise their own languages of art-making. International artists Anselm Kiefer, Cecily Brown, Francesco Clemente, Lynda Benglis and Raqib Shaw, on the other hand, delve deep into their respective practices to forge an inextricable connection with India. To top it all off, there is also an impressive collection of public artworks on display, ranging from a gargantuan Pichwai painting to Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s famous Clouds.
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India’s ‘first installation artist’ Vivan Sundaram has died, aged 79

Source The Art News Paper by Kabir Jhala
One of India's leading contemporary artists, Vivan Sundaram, has died, aged 79, his Mumbai gallery has confirmed. He passed away earlier today in a New Delhi hospital from complications related to a brain haemorrhage. He is survived by his wife, the prominent art historian Geeta Kapur. Sundaram was born in the northern city of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, in 1943, in then-British India. He was the son of the Indian civil servant Kalyan Sundaram, the first law secretary of post-independence India, and Indira Sher-Gil, the sister of Amrita Sher-Gil, India's most famous artists of the 20th-century. He was educated at the Doon School, before studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) in the 1960s under the renowned pedagogue KG Subramanyan, and at the Slade School of Art, London University, where his teachers included RB Kitaj, who influenced his early works with elements of kitsch and Pop Art.
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Coasting the Topography of South Asian Futurisms

Source Hypperallergic by Sadaf Padder
Artists, thinkers, and activists around the world creatively adapt existing terminologies to describe their visions of futurism, pivoting away from the homogenizing term “Indo futurism.” The need for cultivating more expansive and loving frameworks for futurism becomes more urgent by the day. We are in the midst of a sharp rise in religious fanaticism, caste-oppression, and ethnonationalism that harms over a billion and a half people in the Indian subcontinent and across the diaspora. These tensions are exacerbated by the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, a set of oppressions that bleed across 29 states, 8 union territories, neighboring countries and the global diaspora — which numbers over 5.4 million in the United States alone. This exhibition aims to map a topography of South Asian futurisms, and render visible the multiple strategies used by artists to adapt and develop new futurisms, including Dalit futurism, Subaltern futurism, Queer Muslim futurism, eco-futurism and Sufi Sci-Fi futurism.
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Le peintre indien S.H. Raza, un grand maître de l’art moderne

Source RFI par Siegfried Forster

Sayed Haider Raza (1922-2016) faisait partie de l’École de Paris et a vécu longtemps en France. En Inde, il est reconnu comme l’un des plus grands peintres modernes. En Occident, très peu connaissent son nom. Entretien avec Catherine David, commissaire de la première grande rétrospective consacrée à l’artiste en France, au Centre Pompidou.

Indian Art News more than 200.000 page views!

This newsletter allows you to follow the news of Indian contemporary art through a regularly updated international press review. Since 2008, more than 2,700 articles have been listed and 200,000 pages viewed. In the left column of this newsletter, a search engine allows you to explore one of the 2700 articles listed according to the affinities of Hervé Perdriolle, art critic, curator, collector and, since 2021, gallery owner in Brussels: Modesti Perdriolle Gallery 27 rue Saint-Georges 1050 Brussels.

Cette newsletter permet de suivre l'actualité de l'art contemporain indien à travers une revue de presse internationale régulièrement mise à jour. Depuis 2008 plus de 2.700 articles répertoriés et 200.000 pages vues. Dans la colonne gauche de cette newsletter, un moteur de recherche vous permet d’explorer l’un des 2700 articles répertoriés selon les affinités d’Hervé Perdriolle, critique d’art, commissaire d’exposition, collectionneur et, depuis 2021, galeriste à Bruxelles : Modesti Perdriolle Gallery 27 rue saint-georges 1050 Bruxelles.

T. Venkanna 'Looking for Peace'

Upcoming show T. Venkanna 'Looking for Peace' Modesti Perdriolle Gallery Brussels in association with Gallery Maskara from April 13 to June 10, 27 rue Saint-Georges Brussels, Belgium.

Leading Indian Modernist SH Raza gets first public museum retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris

Source The Art Newspaper by Kabir Jhala
One of India's best-known Modernist painters, the late SH Raza, receives his largest-ever retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. SH Raza (1922-2016) (until 15 May) is the first major monographic show of the artist, as well as the first to take place in a state-run institution, and brings together more than 90 works in the capital city of his second home. The Pompidou show spans the artist's entire career, from his beginnings in 1940s Mumbai (then called Bombay), where he was one of the founding members of the hugely influential Bombay Progressives Artists' Group, to his move to France in 1950, where he would be based on-and-off for the remainder of his life, and where he developed a style that mixed post-war French and American painting with Rajasthani miniature traditions. His subjects ranged from country landscapes and churches to Indian temple congregations, Islamic architecture and Western cityscapes; eventually he moved into his more abstract—and arguably better-known—period, which dates from the late 1960s onwards and incorporates elements of Tantrism from South Asian scriptures.
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T. Venkanna’s erotically charged artworks actually relay a crucial message

Source Vogue India by Radhika Iyengar
Amidst a lush, green gem-toned thicket, an orgy is underway. The natural curtains of trees reveal more than they conceal. Nude figures indulge in erotic gratification. The air is thick with desire. If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine a staccato of sounds: throaty grunts of pleasure, half-suspended moans, soft sighs. T. Venkanna’s artwork, titled ‘Neither There Nor Here’ (2022), belongs to a striking collection of large-scale, hand-embroidered paintings that were exhibited at his solo show Love Me As I Am at Gallery Maskara during Mumbai Gallery Weekend in January, alongside a selection of his monochromatic watercolour drawings on Wasli paper. The artist’s visceral creations are not meant for puritans. He presents human beings as their raw, primal selves who flout killjoy conservatism. The figures in his fantastical universe are liberated beings—free of inhibitions, moral judgment and censorship. Here, the markers of gender, caste and class cease to exist.
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Vasu Dixit Tracks Folk Music Journeys with Documentary and Performance Series PaDa Project

Source RollingStone by Anurag Tagat
There’s an air of reverence that hangs in the atmosphere where Vasu Dixit is seated or stood around folk and tribal artists in his music documentary series PaDa Project. On the surface, Dixit – the frontman of folk-fusion band Swarathma in Bengaluru but also a filmmaker in his own right – positions PaDa Project videos as his journey to explore India’s longest-standing music cultures, but it’s less like The Dewarists or SoundTrippin than it is about giving the artists their space. Meeting up with artists from Sikkim, Manipur, Meghalaya, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, Dixit’s PaDa Project offers five performances and five episodes (varying from 15 to 20 minutes in length) that explore how deeply connected folk and tribal music is in India across the land.
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Sohrab Hura revisits his moving image works with ‘Half-Image’ at Offset Projects

Source Stir World by Sukanya Deb
Running parallel to the India Art Fair, annually showcased at the NSIC Grounds in New Delhi, Sohrab Hura presented an exhibition titled Half-Moving at Offset Projects' temporary studio space. The exhibition presented four projects, three of which are responsible for having cultivated a memorable oeuvre for the photographer, and are an extension of his retrospective profile at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, presented in 2022 with the same title. Revisiting his works, through this exhibition, the photographer introspects on his journey as a practitioner, his engagement with storytelling, iterative realities, and a falsified image form.
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The Mumbai Collector Building the City a Blue-Chip Art Space

Source The Wall Street Journal by Kelly Crow
Over the past decade, Ambani Piramal, 31, and her mother, Nita M. Ambani, have steadily gained a reputation in international art circles for helping fund museum shows of Indian art around the world, backed by the $83 billion fortune of Ambani Piramal’s father, Mukesh Ambani, who runs the textile and petroleum empire Reliance Industries Ltd. The family’s Reliance Foundation is the main funder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming summer show on the origins of Buddhist art in India. Yet the plan all along, Ambani Piramal says, was to start convincing faraway museums to send more of their blockbuster traveling shows to India and for the family to support edgy shows closer to home.
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Sharjah Biennial 15 reflects on complex histories through a contemporary lens

Source Architectural Digest by Shaikh Ayaz
It is that time of the year again when the emirate of Sharjah comes alive with an unprecedented showmanship of visual arts, thanks to hundreds of artists, museum curators, gallerists and cultural ambassadors who descend on the Arabian Gulf to leave behind a trail of edgy creativity and philosophical provocations. Currently in its 30th year, Sharjah Biennial's 15th edition makes a bold and authentic statement about the postcolonial future in the global South. Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, this year's biennial is titled "Thinking Historically in the Present”, and it's an ode to the inclusive vision of veteran Nigerian curator and critic Okwui Enwezor who passed away in 2019. Built to encourage reflections on what Al Qasimi calls the "transnational relationships and conversations" and Sharjah's role as a hub for "a spectral and multinodal experience," the bi-annual mega-event once again manages to be global in spirit and scope, yet local in its mission and context.
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