India Art Fair 2023: Debashish Paul ’s sculptural dresses reflect his inner worlds

Source Mint by Avantika Bhuyan
There is a sense of the spiritual in Debashish Paul’s performance. As he walks around the NSIC Grounds, Okhla—venue of the 2023 edition of the India Art Fair—in a sculptural dress, wearing a headgear of matkas, it feels like he is exploring his queer identity with every movement and folding of the fluid textile forms. He attributes this spiritual element to a childhood spent in Phulia village, located within West Bengal’s Nadia district. “Nadia is where Chaitanya Maha prabhu spread his message of bhakti and prem. While growing up, I both watched and participated in kirtans, jatra and putul naach, a performing style with dolls,” says Paul, who is now based in Varanasi—he moved to the city for his masters degree in sculpture at the Banaras Hindu University in 2019.
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Gallery Espace celebrates 35 years with multiple exhibitions

Source The Sunday Guardian by Noor Anand Chawla
In the 35 years since its inception, Gallery Espace in Delhi has become a veritable institution in the arts space through its promotion of Indian contemporary art. Hence, the celebrations for achieving this milestone are bound to be grand, with four different exhibitions being organised over the winter season. Founded by Renu Modi in 1989, the focus of this gallery has always been on promoting emerging and well-established artists in the contemporary sphere. Over the years, they have organised many exhibitions of note. In the 1990s, there was Drawing ’94, Sculpture ’95, Miniprint ’96, and ‘The Self and The World’ (1997), which brought together 16 Indian women artists from Amrita Sher-Gil to Anjolie Ela Menon. In later years, the gallery began promoting fresh talent and experimental art practices with exhibitions like ‘Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai’ (2001), an exposition of pop and kitsch in contemporary art; ‘Leela’ (2003), which grew out of a residency featuring Bhupen Khakar, Amit Ambalal, Atul and Anju Dodiya in Haridwar; ‘Lo Real Maravilloso’ (2009), an overview of magic realism in art, and two editions of ‘Video Wednesday’ (2008-09 and 2011-12), dedicated to video art.
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Artist Nikhil Chopra and his team HH Art Spaces will curate Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025

Source Indian Express by Vandana Kalra
The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), which is to be held from December 2025 to March 2026, will be curated by artist Nikhil Chopra and his team HH Art Spaces. The announcement was made by Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at a press conference in Thiruvananthapuram on November 20. “KMB 2025 is poised to be one of the most memorable editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Let us join together to celebrate this spectacular event that fosters the spirit of art, community and dialogue,” said Vijayan. Welcoming Chopra, KMB president Bose Krishnamachari said, “Known for his evocative and immersive work, Nikhil’s collaboration with the KBF will undoubtedly bring in a fresh and dynamic perspective to the biennale, delivering an experience, and promises to resonate deeply with the visitors, both from Kerala and around the world.”
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Serpentine announce 2025 exhibition highlights

Source FAD Magazine by Mark Westall
Serpentine has announced hightlights from their 2025 exhibition program. Solo exhibitions of Arpita Singh, Giuseppe Penone and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley will be presented in the galleries. Next year will also mark a quarter century since Serpentine’s ambitious annual Pavilion commission began with Dame Zaha Hadid’s inaugural structure in Hyde Park in 2000. “We are honoured to kickstart 2025 with London’s first institutional exhibition by Arpita Singh, who for more than half a century has produced a prolific body of work as one of India’s most singular painters and whom we first encountered during the research for the 2007 exhibition at Serpentine South titled Indian Highway. Through a practice that blends Bengali folk art with modernist explorations of identity, Singh vividly portrays scenes of life and imagination, stories, and symbols, uniting the personal and the universal. This landmark exhibition builds on Serpentine’s legacy of spotlighting trailblazing artists yet to receive global recognition for their work, like Luchita Hurtado, Faith Ringgold, Hervé Télémaque, James Barnor, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, and Barbara Chase-Riboud.” Bettina Korek, CEO, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director
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‘Ulcerous wounds, skin and bones’: How Chittaprosad’s searing sketches chronicled the Bengal famine

Source ScrollIn by Avishek Ray
Weaponised against this censorial attitude, Chittaprosad’s famine drawings must be credited to have practically invented a language appropriate for speaking of an otherwise “unspeakable event” that is, the famine and the resultant experiences of refugeehood, which were, according to many scholarly accounts, contrived by the British imperial policies. Among other things, such traumatic experiences challenge the discursive limits of representation. Both the colonial administration and the bourgeoisie art world maintained certain reservations about their depiction. Thinking in these terms, the famine drawings function as an important vector between experiences of refugeehood, institutional censorship, the grammar of representation and the ethics of spectatorship. It is necessary for me to add that, in delineating Chittaprosad’s famine drawings as iconoclastic, I am speaking principally as a scholar of mobility; and I must insist that readers note the subtitle of Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal: “a Tour through Midnapur District” [italics mine]. Of significance here is to consider how, in this context, Chittaprosad himself embodied the “travelling artist” – a figure that stands in contrast to the imagery of the salon painter – working from outside of the studio set-up and making his sketches and journal entries always on the move.
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Subodh Gupta’s artistic homecoming with a solo show at the Bihar Museum

Source LifeStyle Asia by Akshita Nahar Jain
Subodh Gupta, one of India’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, returns to his roots with ‘The Way Home’, a major solo exhibition opening at the Bihar Museum in Patna this November. In an exclusive interview with Lifestyle Asia, Gupta reflects on the significance of returning to Bihar, his birth state, and how his work has evolved in conversation with his personal experiences and India’s broader cultural shifts. Subodh Gupta’s works are particularly resonant in the context of the Bihar Museum — a place where traditional heritage and contemporary culture converge. Designed under the tutelage of architect, Kenzo Tange, the Bihar Museum offers a setting that is both deeply rooted in the the region’s history and forward-looking in its embrace of contemporary art. Inaugurated in 2015, it houses a vast collection of ancient artefacts, particularly from the Maurya and Gupta periods, as well as more recent Buddhist relics. These historical works, alongside folk and modern art exhibitions, set the stage for a dynamic conversation between the ancient and the contemporary, the sacred and the everyday. This dialogue is central to Subodh Gupta’s practice, making the Bihar Museum the perfect venue for his exhibition.
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The rebel painter who ushered in a new era of Indian art

Souce BBC by Janhavee Moole
Some artists become legends in their lifetime yet remain a mystery years after their death. Indian painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde, born 100 years ago on 2 November 1924, was one such master. Considered one of South Asia's greatest abstract painters, Gaitonde was part of a rebellious generation of artists who laid the foundation for a new era of Indian art in the mid-20th Century. He was deeply inspired by the techniques used by Western painters but his work remained rooted in Asian philosophy, infusing light and texture in ways that, admirers say, evokes a profound sense of calmness. His paintings were meant to be "meditations on the light and universe", says Yamini Mehta, who worked as the international head of South Asian Art at Sotheby’s. "The play of light and shadows and texture makes these paintings dynamic." In a career that spanned decades, Gaitonde never pursued fame or fortune. But his works continue to grab attention at auctions, years after his death in 2001. In 2022, an untitled oil painting by him fetched 420m rupees (nearly $5m; £3.9m), setting a new record for Indian art at that time. The bluish shades of the work reminded viewers of large expanses of the sea or sky. Gaitonde lived as a recluse for most of his life. He was deeply impacted by Japanese Zen philosophy and this meditative mindset was often reflected in his paintings. “Everything starts from silence. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences… Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the canvas to absorb that silence and create,” he told journalist Pritish Nandy in a rare interview in 1991.
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