Of Gonds and their Gods

Source Pune Mirror by Aurogeeta Das
Jangarh’s feelings towards these deities was a fascinating mixture of fear, awe, respect and love — feelings that extended to the many creatures of Mandla’s forests, whom he knew intimately from his boyhood. Jangarh’s love of nature and his keen observation of flora, fauna and avifauna shines through in The Crites Collection’s works. In his pantheon of Gond deities, we see Jangarh’s words ring true — that he tried to crystallise his fear of deities in his art, through the medium of painting. The trees, plants, animals, birds, insects and deities of Mandla’s forests, which Jangarh depicted with such talent, verve and imagination, create an enchanting world, lavishly featured in The Crites Collection’s book and exhibition. Beyond the many paradoxes of his life, art and legacy, readers and viewers of these may be transfixed by the potency of Jangarh’s alchemy — his loving and worshipful transformations of terror, fear, awe and beauty into an artist’s and aesthete’s vision of the numinous.
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An Iconic Mainstream Artist Who Stayed Invisible

Source The Wire by Gita Jayaraj
Dashrath Patel, one of India’s most versatile modernists, would have been 90 this month. By itself the number might not count for much. There is a specific ‘black hole’ of art history into which many artists vanish, never to be spoken of again. In a facetious way, one could even ask, what is an artist compared to even the Taj Mahal that is facing erasure today.
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Gond : The Enchanted Forest

Interview: ‘Without My Audience, the Art Does Not Come Alive’

Source The Wire by Noopur Tiwari
The Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of the world’s leading museums of modern and contemporary art, is holding a retrospective on the feminist Indian artist Nalini Malani titled ‘The Rebellion of the Dead, Retrospective 1969-2018,’ which will run from October 18 to January 8. Malani was born in Karachi in 1946. Her family lived in Kolkata before moving to Mumbai. Women’s place in society, the rise of fundamentalism and ecological destruction are some of the recurring themes of her work. She was one of the first Indian artists to use video in the early 1990s. This is a first retrospective at the prestigious museum dedicated wholly to an Indian artist. In 1985 and 1986, several Indian artists’ works were shown at the museum. More recently, in 2011, an exhibition called ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay‘ brought together works of several Indian and French artists. Malani spoke to The Wire in Paris, tracing her journey and discussing the influences that have informed her work.
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New North and South: creative threads that run across continents

Source Financial Times by Rachel Spence
Suffused with a strange, glowing light that shifts from violet-pink to blotted turquoise, vast ships glide slowly through an industrial waterway, their cargo of gargantuan machinery reaching towards the heavens like the limbs of mysterious sea creatures. In reality, these are shipbuilding cranes embarking on the transcontinental voyage — the last of its kind — from the Tyneside waterfront to their destination at the Bharati shipyard on India’s western coast. Our encounter with this significant yet forgotten bond between South Asia and northern England comes courtesy of a video installation by the trio of Indian contemporary artists who work under the umbrella of the Raqs Media Collective.
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Missives from the Paris contemporary art season: Day 5

Source Architectural Digest by Natasha Jeyasingh
This is juxtaposed with the drawings of Seher Shah, whose interest in brutalist architecture legacy in India examines another complex heritage of modern India. Brutalism formal paradigms are at the same time the marks of international modernism and specially ‘porous’ and adaptable to the ‘localities’ (harsh climate and light, etc.). Shah’s work looks at how that language was spread and assimilated across the country. Pablo Bartholomew’s black and white photographs taken in Calcutta in the 70s brings into focus the Chinese and Burmese diaspora living in the city and his own mixed ethnicity as an Indo-Burmese. In a similar yet very diverse thread, Gauri Gill’s photo project on the aftermath of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the memories of the victims’ relatives is also autobiographical, focusing on a community that moved away from the caste system and gave women equal rights. Both these narratives add to the multilayered story of modernism in the country.
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Missives from the Paris contemporary art season: Day 4

Source The Architectural Digest by Natasha Jeyasingh
So, what is his take on Modernism in India? “Dr. BR Ambedkar’s emancipatory architecture for an Indian Union and Republic is for me the structure of Indian modernism. Modernism, like Indian food, is too wide and diverse to actually map in a linear fashion. You have to see the divergences rather than the convergences if you are mapping something as diverse as Indian modernism…Similarly, Indian art history cannot be the element of few conversations only…You have to be able to read more about Souza’s politics to understand his work than the fact that his name is Francis Newton Souza and he is a Christian…We need to look at all the other elements, of Indian modernism, beyond just a man with a paintbrush painting a nude woman–how is that the accepted definition of Modernism in India?”
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Bhupen Khakhar’s painting sold for 1.1 mn pounds at Sothebys

Source Hindustan Times
‘De-Luxe Tailors’, one of the well-known works of renowned artist Bhupen Khakhar, was sold at a record price of 1.1 million pounds at Sothebys in London on Tuesday. ‘De-Luxe Tailors’, which is the last of the seminal Tradesman series by Khakhar, epitomises the artist’s early style and is a signature work from this period, said a Sotheby’s statement. This painting was a part of painter Howard Hodgkin’s personal collection. He had been a mentor to Khakhar and had hosted the artist many times in the late 1970s.
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Imagination in Flight

Source The Indian Express
Nagaland-based Akup Buchem’s electric hand-sewing machine sits in a corner of a bathroom, by the washbasin, incessantly tapping away at a piece of paper. There’s no particular design mapped out. Delhi-based Ritika Mittal has two knitting needles performing the action of knitting, without threads. Debasis Beura from Bhubaneshwar absorbs all his thoughts into the dark frame of window, allowing only a sliver of red light to sieve through a crack in the wall. These explorations in art are meant to question the formality of practice and space. They are part of “The Moving Image: A Course Exploring Light, Movement and Narrative”, organised by Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and Serendipity Arts Trust (SAT). For a month, 14 young artists experimented with kinetic art, photography and video, and mentoring them were senior artists such as Susanta Mandal, Chandan Gomes, Babu Eshwar Prasad and Lokesh Khodke.
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A Solo Exhibition of Indian Street Photography

Source Blouin Art Info
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an introducer of one of the most popular genre of today’s photography - color street photography. He worked and published his works effectively from the late 1960s until his death in 1999. He was born into a noble family in Rajasthan. Though he lived in Hong Kong, Paris, London, and New York; but his eye was continuously drawn back to his native India. This retrospective exhibition will display his photographic work at the crossroads of Western modernization and conventional South East Asian form of capturing the world through lens.
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Nahargarh Fort to soon turn into an art gallery

Source Business Standard
The art exhibition, which will be launched on December 10, has been curated by Peter Nagy and will showcase artworks by 14 Indian artists like Huma Bhaba's 'God of Some Things' a bronze statue, Jitish Kallat's 'Annexation', 'Vertical Chronicle of a Turbulent Equilibrium', Bharti Kher's 'Impossible Triangle'. The other Indian artists whose collection will be highlighted are Subodh Gupta, Arman, Astha Butail, Vibha Galhotra, Reena Kallat, Bharti Kher, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Manish Nai, Gyan Panchal, Prashant Pandey, Thukral and Tagra, Ravinder Reddy, Asim Waqif, Benitha Perciyal and others.
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Missives from the Paris contemporary art season: Day 3

Source Architectural Digest by Natasha Jeyasingh
“The Lafayette sector is a curated section where galleries under 10 years are selected based on specific proposals sent. It’s a great section to be a part of—the overall system is very helpful for a young gallery, not only do they help monetarily by reducing prices but they really aid your presence by bringing specific institutions, collectors and curators to you. The Lafayette section also opens an hour before the main fair. You usually get to be a part of it once but we feel grateful that they liked our proposal well enough to have been showcased twice,” states Priyanka Raja, one half of the founding team of Experimenter.
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Missives from the Paris contemporary art season: Day 2

Source Architectural Digest by Natasha Jeyasingh
I’m on my way to the iconic Villa Vassilieff to see the exhibition ‘Punasha Party’ curated by Artist Samit Das and Sumesh Sharma founder of Clark House Initiative. Located near the busy station of Montparnass, 21 avenue du Maine (where the villa is located) is a quiet dead end alley, a veritable time capsule preserving a sense of the great creative community of Montparnasse from the early 20th century. The 30 ivy covered studios, with their large bay windows and wooden floors were built in 1901 by Joseph Roux for artists and craftsmen. From 1912 until 1929 Russian artist Marie Vassiliev a former student of Matisse took up a studio here which became the meeting point for most of the artists living in Paris at that time such as Picasso, Braque, Modigliani , Fernand Léger, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Matisse, Foujita, and many others.
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Missives from the Paris contemporary art season: Day 1

Source Architectural Digest by Natasha Jeyasingh
Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘I love Paris every moment of the year’ but I have to say, Paris when the sun is shining, is a dream. The sky is bluer, the vistas longer and brighter, cafes and park benches spill over with people soaking up the sun, and the world, for the moment, seems perfect. I’m glad it’s not a gloomy, grey October day and I’m particularly chuffed to be here when there is so much he(ART) in the air. There’s a reason why Paris is on the map of art aficionados, with around 130 museums, top galleries, international fairs and a thriving contemporary art scene: no matter where you go, there’s always something to see.
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Exploring Interfaith Dialogue With ‘Terminal’

Source The Hoya by Alia Kawar
Delving more into his practice and work on “Terminal,” Gupta explained the inspiration behind the title of his work. According to Gupta, two things are most important to his country: politics and religion. “‘Terminal’ came from those aspects when I was in the process of making this work. Given the title, ‘Terminal’ is a space where your journey either starts or where your journey ends,” he said. Walking into the space of the 15-foot-tall installation, composed of tall spires comprised of golden brass vessels interconnected by white threads, viewers will note that there is no obvious beginning or end to the piece. Gupta intentionally has the viewer decide how to interpret the terminal.
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Jangarh and the Crites

Source The Hindu by Georgina Maddox
Jangarh, sitting on a bamboo mat under a large tree with his drawings and paintings spread out before him, was wearing his ‘uniform’ faded jeans and a checked flannel shirt. He smiled shyly as I told him how much my wife, Nilou, and I admired his drawings and paintings…” This is how art collector Mitchell S. Crites recalls his first meeting with the late Pardhan Gond artist, Jangarh Singh Shyam, in the preface to the newly published Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest, Paintings and Drawings from the Crites Collection. Crites and his wife Niloufar own one of the largest collections of Shyam’s work.
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Shifting Shapes

Source Pune Mirror by Navjyoti Dalal
Based on Gorakhnath’s “Shunya Gadh Shahar”, Shoonya Ghar has been Shetty’s muse since his art school (Sir JJ School of Art) days. “I was introduced to poetry as a bhajan by Pandit Kumar Gandharva. In fact, I became interested in poetry because of Kumar Gandharva, especially his nirguni bhajans. “Shunya Gadh Shahar” remained with me for a long time. Poetry has been a part of my life by way of pure poetry, or songs. My father was a yakshagana (a dance theatre form from Karnataka) artist, and an environment full of music and songs introduced me to a lot of poetry. It (poetry) influenced my art, and how I learned to make art,” says Shetty. It was only earlier in this decade that the poem made its way into his art. “I wondered if I can mediate the two, poetry and art. Finally it led to this piece of work,” he adds.
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Jean-Daniel Allanche à l’Outsider Art Fair

Source Galerie Hervé Perdriolle
"L’atelier moléculaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés" de Jean-Daniel Allanche est exposé à l’Outsider Art Fair du 19 au 22 octobre 2017 au 22 rue de la Michodière 75002 Paris (Galerie Hervé Perdriolle - stand 28 - 2ème étage). Des oeuvres de Jean-Daniel Allanche feront partie de l’exposition "Vestiges" au Folk Art Museum de New York en 2018.
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An Exhibition of Never Before Seen Art of Jangarh Singh Shyam Celebrates the Life of a Genius Too Often Remembered for his Death

Source The Ladies Compartment by Avantika Mehta
The exhibit is unique and unlike any of the earlier exhibitions of Shyam’s work. It’s the first consolidated collection of the Gondi artist’s work from his early days selling unsigned paintings at the Small Industries Museum to the art he created towards his end. An exploration of the work chronicles — and makes recognisable on sight — Shyam’s progression from indigenous artist to a genius who could work on any scale, with any medium, and was never afraid to incorporate new concepts into his art. After walking through a narrow corridor lined with his earlier work, I walked into a vast room and am greeted by a larger than life painting of Shiv Shesh Nag made by Shyam in 1990. The pictures seen on the Internet do not do these works justice. Standing tall against a deep yellow background, multi-coloured cobra rears its fully unfurled head at me. The painting is visceral. I think it hissed. Every colour block holds a different intricate pattern that needs to be carefully examined to be seen. These details, hidden in plain sight, are Shyam’s invitation to the viewer to look closer and not take for granted that local artisans are simple or see their work as unsophisticated.
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Fundraiser auction for fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Source The New Indian Express
Mumbai, Oct 16 (PTI) Modern and contemporary artworks by Amrita Sher-Gil, A Ramachandran, Vivan Sundaram, Subodh Gupta and others will go under the hammer at Kochi Biennale Foundation's (KBF) upcoming fundraiser auction here. Scheduled to be held on October 31 at Saffronart's office in Prabhadevi, the sale, featuring works by 41 artists, is being organised to raise money to support the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB). Other prominent names at the sale, that will witness both live and online bidding, include -- Sahej Rahal, Bharti Kher, Atul Dodiya, TV Santhosh, Pushpamala N, Abir Karmakar, Prajakta Potnis, Parvathi Nayar, Manjunath Kamath and Kerala artists Bhagyanath, Benitha Perciyal, P S Jalaja, KP Reji, Sosa Joseph, Vivek Vilasini and Gigi Scaria. Francesco Clemente, an Italian contemporary artist, is the only foreigner whose work will be auctioned.
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Howard Hodgkin’s collection comes to auction

Source Apollo Magazine by Suzan Moore
Howard Hodgkin belongs to a distinguished tradition of artist-collectors – not least among them his fellow knights, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is hard to imagine now, but back in the 1960s the young painter was probably more admired in contemporary art circles for his ‘eye’ as a collector of art rather than as a maker of it, his own work being inconveniently difficult to pigeonhole. By the 1980s, the still-growing collection of Mughal-period Indian paintings and drawings – traditionally and misleading known as miniatures – that he began to amass at the tender age of 14 was being exhibited. These days, it is recognised as one of the greatest of its kind.
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Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam’s forest is full of creatures that were never meant to be seen

Source Scroll In by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri
It’s been 16 years since Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam committed suicide, but art scholar and collector Mitchell Abdul Karim Crites can never forget their first meeting. In the 1980s, Crites had begun to hear murmurs in the art world about an exceptionally talented Gond artist from Bhopal. In 1987, Crites visited Delhi’s annual Suraj Kund crafts mela and found Shyam, dressed in a checked flannel shirt and jeans, sitting on a bamboo mat under a tree, surrounded by his paintings. The canvases were hypnotic: dots and dashes in various hues depicted birds like the red-wattled lapwing and the brown wood owl along with an assortment of trees, gods and goddesses worshipped by the Gondi people, an adivasi tribe indigenous to Central India. Crites immediately invited Shyam to visit him and his wife in New Delhi. From that first meeting, Crites said, they became friends.
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The rise of the art hotel

Source Hindustan Times by Vir Sanghvi
Most people with any interest in Indian art and culture have, I imagine, heard of Rajeev Sethi. You have probably heard of his role in the public arts, in the context of preserving Indian culture and of course, the Festivals of India and the other celebrations of our vibrant heritage. What I did not know, till I went to see him at his art-filled office in Delhi’s South Extension, is how plugged in Rajeev has been to the world of hotels. When he explained how he got involved, it made perfect sense.
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Developing interest among the uninformed is a challenge: Kiran Nadar

Source The Economic Times by Shelley Singh
Philanthropist Kiran Nadar , who runs one of the largest private art museums of the country, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), is looking to expand with a larger museum in Delhi. But Nadar rues art museums are not a priority with the government. "I understand there are more pressing needs," says Nadar but points out that a museum will help change the tepid interest towards art in Delhi and boost budding artists. Nadar, wife of technology titan Shiv Nadar, has more than 5,000 modern and contemporary artworks in her collection. She is partly sponsoring Indian artists Jayashree Chakravarty and Nalini Malani, in exhibitions opening in Paris in mid-October the coming week. In an interview with ET, Nadar discusses the art scene in India, the growth of KNMA, future plans and more.
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Nita Ambani bats for Indian art at the Met; Reliance Foundation gives ‘generous gift’ to NY museum

Source The Economic Times by Masoom Gupte
Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York can hope to catch some landmark Indian exhibits over the next few years. Earlier this week, The Met announced that this is being made possible by a "generous gift" from the Reliance Foundation. The philanthropic arm of Reliance Industries, headed by Nita Ambani, will support a range of exhibitions "examining the accomplishments and influence of the arts and artists of India across time and media" at the museum over the next few years.
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Behind The Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the heart of economic growth

Source The Brunei Gallery
For the last quarter of a century the Indian economy has been booming, and is predicted to become one of the two largest economies in the world by mid-century. But what does this growth mean for the people on whose land and labour it is based? Behind The Indian Boom travels across the country to meet its Dalits and Adivasis – its low caste and tribal communities – historically stigmatised as ‘untouchable’ and ‘wild’.
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A Vision in Light: Nalini Malani’s retrospective at Centre Pompidou

Source Architectural Digest by Uma Nair
Participant in 21 Biennales—India’s first contemporary artist to have a retrospective at Centre Georges Pompidou—high priestess of contemporary Indian art, Nalini Malani’s retrospective will draw in an avant-garde crowd for this unique collaboration between the Centre Pompidou, Castello di Rivoli and Galerie Lelong in France and Italy.
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Artists paint the town red for St+art Mumbai ’17

Source Architectural Digest by Barry Rodgers
Contemporary art has undergone a perceptional makeover over the years—courtesy a group of socially responsible youth who felt the need to give back to their cities a sense of creativity and imagination. St+art India, a non-profit organization, has been at the forefront of this artistic revolution. Since 2014, this group has been adding colour and creativity to the mostly barren walls of cities across the country.
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Seeing India Through a Contemporary Lens

Source The New York Times by Arthur Lubow
“He was stung by these American blinders that see America as the world and other places as foreign,” said Mia Fineman, the associate curator of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who has organized a Singh retrospective at the Met Breuer through Jan. 2. (It will then travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.) Because Singh’s photographs depict scenes that Western viewers find exotic, it is easy to overlook their formally inventive compositions and masterful technique — to realize that they are not simply reportage, they are art.
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The Parekhs: Man, woman and their canvasses

Embed from Getty Images
Source DNA by Gargi Gupta
The contrast between the personality and practice of Manu and Madhvi Parekh, one of the few practising husband-wife pairs in Indian art, couldn't be more glaring. And yet, as one looks at paintings made over the decades at their concurrently running retrospectives in the capital (Manu Parekh: 60 years of Selected Works was on show at the National Gallery of Modern Art from mid-August to last Sunday, while Madhvi Parekh: The Curious Seeker, opened on September 21 at Delhi Art Gallery and will run till the end of November) one notices that they share a common penchant for experimentation and for trying out new expressions and subjects as a response to new realities, new places and new paintings. This is not common in contemporary art where artists tend to stick with an expression that has found favour with patrons and critics.
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Illuminating India shows off contemporary and archive photography at the Science Museum

Source by British Journal of Photography Eoin Murray
lluminating India: Photography 1857-2017, is the first exhibition to document the history of photography in India, and includes both archive and contemporary work. It includes images by India’s first known photographer Ahmad Ali Khan, pioneering art photographer Marahaja Ram Singh II, the country’s first female photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla; and award-winning contemporary photographers such Magnum’s Sohrab Hura. It also includes images of India taken by non-Indians, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof, Margaret Bourke White, Lucien Hervé, Mitch Epstein, Vasantha Yogananthan, and Olivia Arthur.
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Get Lost Inside These Golden Spires Transforming the Sackler Pavilion

Source SmithsonianMag by Roger Catlin
Terminal is the latest exhibit of contemporary Asian art in the series it called Perspectives. Previous artists presented include Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei and Michael Joo. The program now being called Sackler Contemporary to mark the 30th anniversary of the Sackler opening in 1987 alongside the Freer, the Smithsonian’s oldest art museum. As such, Terminal is the newest work along the new exhibits at the complex featuring Asian art that in some cases dates back millennia.
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Value spent by Indian clients at Sotheby’s rose by 54% in last 5 yrs: Sotheby's India

Source Moneycontrol by Tasmayee Laha Roy
India is a major priority for Sotheby’s and we have been taking steps to increase the scale and scope of what we offer in the country and as a result we’ve seen the the value spent by Indian clients at Sotheby’s increase by 54 percent in the last five years. In 2015 we opened our new office in the Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, and have since been recruiting new staff, to allow us to support an expanded calendar of events, lectures, exhibitions, and charity sales. Over the last 5 years 32 percent of our Indian clients were active in our global departments – in the sale categories of Old Master Paintings, International Contemporary, International Jewellery sales and Impressionist & Modern Art sales which are offered in our sale rooms around the word. This increase has in turn lead to growth to the tune of 40 percent in the value they’ve spent in our international sales for these collecting categories.
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