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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