Best in show: India's Experimenter gallery wins Frieze in London's top stand award

Source The Art Newspaper by Kabir Jhala
The Frieze London Stand Prize for the best gallery presentation has this year been awarded to Experimenter, from India. The gallery, founded in 2009 by Priyanka and Prateek Raja, has two locations in Kolkata, and a further space in Mumbai, which opened last year. Experimenter’s winning stand, with its walls and carpet in hues of grey, is loosely themed around the concept of a grid, and brings together an intergenerational group of eight women artists on its roster. On a more abstract level, the grid also relates to how repetition and the act of small mark-making are present throughout the practices of Experimenter's artists, Priyanka Raja says. "Whether it's in the meditative dots of Radhika Khimji's paintings, or Bhasha Chakrabarti's reflection on the slow passing of time, there is a clear formal resonance between all the artists we represent." These lines of continuity also allow for a dialogue across centuries: a painting by Reba Hore, who was born in 1926 and died in 2008, focuses on erasure, and chimes with the overall practice of one of the gallery's youngest artists, Biraaj Dodiya, born in 1993, whose paintings are self-termed as "excavations".
> read more

Hermès’s artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas speaks to Vogue India on his love for India and the importance of inventiveness

Source Vogue India by Divya Bala
Prior to graduating from Brown University in art history, Pierre-Alexis began at Hermès as a teenager when the brand opened its first workshop outside of the store space in 1991. He counts his first memories as visiting his father and grandfather in the workshop after school, where he continued to work for seven years. “It was a very familiar environment, and making things with your hands, being proud of what you make, learning and transmitting [the craft], this was all my norm. My father used to say, ‘Craftsmen of the world unite.’ By that, he meant that we are all human beings, we are inventive and a creative species. We develop skills and tools and have done that for over 50,000 years,” Pierre-Alexis says. “Artificial intelligence is great, but let’s not forget we have 10 fingers and senses and an incredible apparatus [he gestures to the brain] to transform what Mother Nature gives us for the better, for the long term to make useful and beautiful objects. I really believe in that. Going to India is a confirmation of that.
> read more