Bridging Past And Present: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale Returns

Source Harper's Bazaar by Dana Awartani
As the largest contemporary art biennale in South Asia, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale returns this year from 12 December to 29 March 2019 and will feature a series of talks, workshops, film screenings and music alongside its central art show, the likes of which have never been seen in India before. Located in Kochi, the heart of Kerala, the fourth edition of the exhibition reignites regional ties to the city’s mythical past in the midst of its fast-paced economic and cultural boom. It bridges Kochi’s history of trade and intercultural interaction at the ancient and now archaeological port of Muziris, with its current realities in a global context.
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Connecting the Dots

Source The Indian Express by Divya A
Galarrwuy Yunupingu, a towering leader of the Australian indigenous community, had remarked in 1989: “English is incapable of describing our relationship to the land of our ancestors. We decided to describe it in a way we hoped non-Aboriginal people would understand; through pictures. If they wouldn’t listen to our words, they might try and understand our paintings.” It is perhaps this concept that finds resonance in this section of the showcase. Pausing before a giant canvas painted with spiral lines, created by a woman aboriginal artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray in 1995, Cubillo says, “Aboriginal art is more popular than any other art in Australia. In fact, the highest price that a work has fetched till date has been done by this artist, who recently passed away.” Adwaita Gadanayak, Director-General of NGMA, says, “The display holds lessons for us on how to preserve and focus on our traditional art forms. For instance, the Gond art form of Madhya Pradesh is quite old and unique, but we dismiss all our tribal art forms as ‘craft’.”
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Hervé Perdriolle est l'invité de Pierre Philippe Cadert

Source Vertigo RTS1 par Pierre Philippe Cadert
Hervé Perdriolle est collectionneur, critique dʹart et commissaire dʹexposition. Il a été le promoteur de la Figuration Libre et a participé en France aux premières expositions notamment de Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring (1984) et Ravinder Reddy (2000). Depuis 1996, son activité principale consiste à faire connaître et à promouvoir les "Autres maîtres de lʹInde" à travers les œuvres des meilleurs artistes contemporains de lʹart tribal et de lʹart populaire Indiens. A l'occasion de la 25ème édition du Festival des 5 Continents, il est le commissaire de l'exposition "Inde", pour laquelle il a choisi une quinzaine d'artistes indiens. A découvrir au Manoir de Martigny jusqu'au 5 août 2018.
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Invisible Webs by Amit Dutta

"Invisible Webs" d'Amit Dutta est un livre fabuleux d'intelligence, de raffinement et de poésie tant par son contenu que par sa forme. Cet essai érudit et anticonventionnel est la première étude que j'ai l'occasion de lire sur un artiste indien, autodidacte et inclassable, Jangarh Singh Shyam, que l'auteur aborde avec le même sérieux et la même sensibilité que celui qui sied à l'étude de toute œuvre évidente et pleinement inscrite dans une logique historique. Elle s'inscrit dans une approche à la fois simple et complexe. A la manière d'André Malraux et de K. G. Subramanyan, elle contextualise l'œuvre ici concernée pour dépasser le seul champ des des beaux-arts, par trop limité quand on s'y complait et cantonne, et aborder celui, sans frontière, des sciences humaines. La découverte de ce livre est pour moi un plaisir immense. Un grand merci pour l'auteur et l'éditeur de cet ouvrage qui, autre prouesse, ont réussi à faire de cet essai, si dense du point de vue de la lecture, un objet, par sa structure éditoriale et sa maquette rafinée, un livre d'art exceptionnel.

"Invisible Webs" by Amit Dutta is a fabulous book of intelligence, refinement and poetry, both in content and form. This scholarly and unconventional essay is the first study that I have the opportunity to read about an Indian artist, self-taught and unclassifiable, Jangarh Singh Shyam, whom the author approaches with the same seriousness and sensitivity as that which suits study of any work that is obvious and fully inscribed in a historical logic. It is part of an approach that is both simple and complex. In the manner of André Malraux and KG Subramanyan, it contextualises the work here concerned to go beyond the field of the fine arts, too limited when it is used and confined, and address that without borders, social science. The discovery of this book is for me an immense pleasure. A big thank you for the author and publisher of this book, which, another feat, have managed to make this essay, so dense from the point of view of reading, an object, by its editorial structure and refined model, an exceptional art book.
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Indian Art Touches New Records in Prices and Sales in Auctions

Source The Wire by John Elliott
Believed to have been bought by Kiran Nadar, India’s leading collector who has a large art museum in Delhi, the 32in x 16in oil on canvas fetched a total price of £548,750 ($732,000) including buyer’s premium. That was five to ten times the prices that have paid for similar works by the artist in other Christie’s auctions, and was inevitably a personal world record. There is strong competition between the four or five main auction houses for South Asian art sales at a time when the top collectors are only interested in an artist’s best works and when it is becoming increasingly difficult to find lots of sufficient quality.
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Saffronart’s 200th auction: Tyeb Mehta’s Kali creates new record, fetches $3.998.000

Source Hindustan Times by Krutika Behrawala
Since its announcement as the centrepiece of Saffronart’s milestone 200th auction, all eyes were on Tyeb Mehta’s iconic Untitled (Kali; 1989). On Thursday evening, the painting that features the raging goddess – one of only three standing figures that Mehta painted in his lifetime – fetched a whopping Rs 26.4 crore (all prices are inclusive of buyer’s premium), setting a new record for the modernist. His previous record was set at a Christie’s auction where his 1994 Untitled (Woman on Rickshaw) sold for Rs 22.99 crore.
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First List of Participating Artists for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 Out

Source BLive
On curating an exhibition of this scale, Anita Dube noted: “My earliest intuitive vision for this edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to explore the possibilities for a non-alienated life has remained with me. The need to listen, think, and learn with each other, particularly voices from the margins – of women, of the queer community, the oppressed castes, the whispers and signs of nature – with a spirit of freedom and comradeship is vital. In both the exhibition and the carefully designed interactive spaces, I hope the incredible range of exhibiting artists and visitors will become active participants and co-producers of the Biennale as a knowledge laboratory.”
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India’s Contemporary Art Market Makes a Cautious Comeback

Source The New York Times by Nina Siegal
“The auction houses pretty much vacated the contemporary sector post-2008 when there was a large correction to the Indian art market,” said Mort Chatterjee, co-director of the Chatterjee & Lal gallery in Mumbai. “In the last 10 years, it has been left to the contemporary gallery scene in India to carry the contemporary art market.” “We feel honestly — and it’s not only because I’m an eternal optimist — but I feel like 2018 is the year it will turn around,” he added. “One of the reasons is because of the India Art Fair, and there certainly is a new generation of Indian buyers whose fingers were not burned by that correction.” Priyanka Raja, co-director of Experimenter, said in a telephone interview that she had noticed a shift, but that she felt that growth was cautiously steady. “Privately, collectors are buying in a more meaningful way,” she said. “There is wealth in this country, but when the collectors start taking their collections more seriously, like they do now, there’s a lot of potential. But it’s still early. It’s hard to say that we are a booming market. No, it is a growing market.”
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Earth Warriors: an amalgamation of traditional tribal and folk artworks

Source The Hindu by Medhavi Dhyani
‘Earth Warriors’ was brought to life by the celebrated art curator Minhazz Majumdar. Through the artworks she put together, she sought to represent the diversity within the umbrella category of tribal-folk art, which for her embodies the Indian artistic and cultural ethos, by including forms like Bhil and Gond Art from Central India, Warli paintings from Maharashtra, Hazaribagh paintings, Bengali Pattachitra art, Madhubani paintings from Mithila, and the bamboo basket-weaving craft from Meghalaya.
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L'Inde des champs et l'Inde des villes

Source Accrochages juin 2018

Pour son exposition d'été consacrée à l'Inde, le Manoir de la Ville de Martigny accueille, du 26 mai au 5 août 2018, les œuvres d'une quinzaine d'artistes qui permettent de découvrir la richesse et la diversité culturelle de l'art contemporain indien, côté campagnes et côté villes.
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Martigny: le Manoir illumine l'Inde, terre de contrastes

Source Le Nouvelliste par Jean-François Albelda
Jusqu’au 5 août, le Manoir de Martigny montre la diversité de la production artistique indienne, où tradition et modernité ne font qu’un.
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Painting on red earth

Source Mid-Day by Benita Fernando
Jivya Soma Mashe, who passed away this month, is credited not just as the artist who popularised Warli, but as the one who pioneered it as an art form. How did he make it relevant then and now? Mentored by Bhaskar Kulkarni, a senior member of Crafts Board, Mashe had his first solo exhibition in 1975 at Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy’s Gallery Chemould. It was the first time that an exhibition of an artist from an indigenous community was held at a contemporary art gallery. When the gallery shifted in 2010, from Kala Ghoda to Fort, the gallerists decided to bid farewell by revisiting Mashe’s works, instead of a group show of any of the other stellar Modernists. “He was not just an artist who transported the ritual tradition into a parallel contemporary form of art, but also a man of vision. He could foresee that this art would convey the daily life of his people and his own life,” says Dalmia.
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Jivya Soma Mashe / Journée Portes Ouvertes samedi 9 juin de 11h à 19h

Galerie Hervé Perdriolle
Hervé Perdriolle vous invite à une journée spéciale portes ouvertes en mémoire de Jivya Soma Mashe, le légendaire artiste de la tribu warli, qui nous a quitté le 15 mai dernier. Une sélection d'œuvres et de documents permettront d'évoquer vingt années de rencontres privilégiées et d'expositions : Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), Museumkunst Palast (Düsseldorf), PAC (Milan), Halle Saint-Pierre (Paris), Reina Sofia (Madrid), Fondation Cartier (Paris)... JOURNEE PORTES OUVERTES SAMEDI 9 JUIN DE 11H A 19H SUR INSCRIPTION PAR MAIL : h.perdriolle(at)gmail.com, merci de nous préciser votre nom et l'heure à laquelle vous souhaitez visiter la galerie.
> Jivya Soma Mashe présentation en ligne

When a Ravinder Reddy sculpture was almost destroyed by sledgehammers

Source Livemint by Tanuj Kumar
The scene could make for the nail-biting finale of a film—best imagined in slow motion. In the early 1980s, the Indian contemporary artist G. Ravinder Reddy made one of his earliest nude women sculptures, while on a scholarship at Goldsmiths’ College, London. His shoestring budget meant he couldn’t ship it to India, so he left it with his professor, recounts Reddy on the phone from Hyderabad. The professor, for reasons not known, passed it on to someone else. When the other custodian showed up to collect it from the college gymnasium, where it was kept, he was horrified to see people standing with sledgehammers, ready to dismantle the work. Its base had already been pulled apart but the sculpture was claimed by the collector at the last moment, freezing the falling hammers mid-air. “It really was with only seconds to go that I managed to save the Goddess,” writes the anonymous collector in a statement from Christie’s.
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