Picasso: The Impassioned Image at Smith College, artdaly.com, july 27, 2006

Picasso: The Impassioned Image at Smith College

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881 - 1973), Two Grotesque Heads, 1949. Lithograph on paper. Purchased, 1951:127-1. Photograph by Stephen Petegorsky.


NORTHAMPTON, MA.- The Smith College Museum of Art continues its summer-long Modern Masters series with a show of works on paper by Pablo Picasso. The exhibition, entitled The Impassioned Image, will be on view at SCMA through Sunday, August 20.

One of the best known artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) left behind a staggering output of works in all media. A prolific and inventive printmaker, Picasso consistently stretched the boundaries of the medium, fueled by his intuitive and instinctive approach to drawing.

On view in a gallery dedicated to exhibiting the museum’s works on paper, visitors can view a total of 49 works by the master artist: three drawings and 46 prints, made by Picasso over a period of 64 years. The works are drawn primarily from SCMA’s collection with a few outstanding loans. The show features a range of works on paper from all of Picasso’s major periods and styles, highlighting the technical and pictorial innovations that both guided and drove his work.

Aprile Gallant, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at SCMA, said of the exhibition, “Instead of just a few highlights that amount to individual moments in such a varied life, visitors will be able to follow threads of thought from one piece to another over decades.”

Picasso was an immensely prolific artist with an innate appetite for experimentation—two characteristics that made him a successful and fascinating printmaker. The artist made nearly two thousand prints in his lifetime, with his graphic production spanning the breadth of his career, beginning in 1899 and lasting until his death. The works that make up the Saltimbanques suite, shown in their entirety here, are among Picasso’s earliest prints. Two other series included in this exhibition—Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and selections from the Vollard Suite—represent one of the most productive and creative periods of Picasso’s career as a printmaker.

Picasso experimented with all major print media—etching, engraving, aquatint, drypoint, and woodcut—and later incorporated lithography and linocut into his graphic oeuvre. He was technically and compositionally adventurous, often creating multiple states, or versions, of a single work to achieve desired results. The work shown in this exhibition is a testament to his great abilities in various media.

Several of the prints exhibited are illustrations of narratives and poetry. The exhibition is expressive of his love for both contemporary and historical literature. While these unusual and beautiful prints stay true to Picasso’s artistic vision and methods they are very different from the cubist paintings most commonly associated with Picasso’s work, as are all of the prints and drawings featured in The Impassioned Image.

artdaly.com, july 27, 2006

Anant art gallery presents Collaborative explorations in clay and fibre

Nalini Malani at the Peabody Essex Museum: artdaily.com, july 25, 2006

Nalini Malani at the Peabody Essex Museum Nalini Malani, City of Desires. Installation , Ephemeral wall drawings and paintings, 427x1830 cm, 1992.

SALEM.—The Peabody Essex Museum is pleased to present Exposing the Source: The Paintings of Nalini Malani, approximately 40 works in oil, acrylic, watercolor, and mixed media, as well as video installations. Nalini Malani is one of India’s leading contemporary artists, known for her politically charged work. The paintings in this show are drawn principally from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, considered one of the most important collections of contemporary Indian art outside of Asia.

Malani’s powerful, dream-like imagery straddles issues of individual, social, and political identity. Malani’s city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is now the second largest in the world and an ongoing subject of her paintings. The lives of women, the predicaments of gender, and the struggle for voice and power feature prominently in these works. Ancient Greek and Hindu epics, and modern European drama, give additional subtext to Malani’s complex, layered surfaces.

“Nalini Malani probes beneath surface appearances to locate essential truths of the human condition. She draws from within herself to expose the depths of human emotion—love, hate, fear, lust, pleasure, aggression, pain,” writes Susan Bean, curator of South Asian and Korean Art, in the introduction to the exhibition.

Exposing the Source is organized along several themes, including Woman’s Room, a potent body of work that interprets women’s experiences and roles as an allegory for our time; Undercurrents, paintings that look at the underlying realities of urban life and the consequences of man-made ecological disasters; and Stories Retold, in which Malani reinterprets classic epic narratives and modern drama to reveal universal, yet elusive, aspects of the human experience. As in much of Malani’s work, she presents these stories from the viewpoint of powerful women, for example, Radha, Sita, and Medea–major figures in Indian and European cultural history.

Malani is also known internationally for her media- and performance-based installations. Two of her videos are included in this exhibition: Stains(animation, video–DVD, with audio, 2002), in which the artist’spartially transparent, unsettled shapes take on new meaning through the immediacy of film; and Unity in Diversity (video–DVD, with audio, 2003), based on the 2002 attacks against Muslims in Gujarat, India.

Born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1946 and currently residing in Mumbai, Malani's work has been shown at important exhibitions around the world, including the 2005 Venice Biennale; the 2005 show Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum in New York; the 2003 Istanbul Biennale; and a solo show at The New Museum in New York in 2002. In 2007, Malani will have an international traveling solo show starting at the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Artdaily.com July 25, 2006

A requiem for art? Kishore Singh / Business standard New Delhi July 25, 2006

A requiem for art?

Kishore Singh / Business standard New Delhi July 25, 2006




AUCTION: The fall of the gavel at the Rs 17 crore Osian's auction failed to thrill collectors, but opened up a new direction in film memorabilia.

Consider these facts:

· For those familiar with art in India, the July 20 auction in the capital by Osian’s was probably its weakest collection ever to be shown — and auctioned.
· At a time when every auction has been making waves for record prices commanded by works of art, the Osian’s sale was a lacklustre event, and even the bidding lacked energy. Only some months back, Indian art circles were agog at the price a work by Amrita Sher-gil had fetched — an astonishing Rs 6.5 crore. Therefore, when on Thursday a collector picked up a work (okay, a small work) for Rs 1.2 crore, for many it was not dissimilar to the Sensex crash.

Was the market correcting itself? After all, there were going to be limited opportunities to bid for a Sher-gil — so why wasn’t there active jostling for the painting?

Nor was that the only jolt. Other masters sold without a flurry of bids, for amounts less than what punters had bet on — Tyeb Mehta Rs 3 crore, V S Gaitonde Rs 2.4 crore, M F Husain Rs 1.3 crore, and two Ramkumars for Rs 42 lakh and Rs 60 lakh (all prices are gavel or bid prices).

Several works were returned unsold to the house, and a large number of artists — not “unknowns”, but not part of the popular auction circuit either, commanded less than arresting prices.

To be fair, this wasn’t part of Osian’s “Masterpieces” series, and as part of the ABC (or Art, Book & Cinema) series, popular works — books, cinema memorabilia — “were attempting to piggyback on the appeal of contemporary art”, according to Osian’s chairman Neville Tuli.

Tuli’s argument — valid to an extent — was to make available works by artists who are not so well known, and gain them recognition. “It was a conscious decision to include artists people were not buying,” he said.

“I am not concerned about what is saleable today because in 3-5 years the market will have changed and collectors will be kicking themselves for not having bought a Hemanta Mishra for Rs 4 lakh!”

A frisson of excitement ran through the bidders and onlookers when the Chittaprosad (‘Lovers’) series came up for auction, rivalled, possibly, only by the more frenzied bidding for posters and other “printed” materials including a set of 25 stills from the film, Mughal-e-Azam (Claire de Boer outbid gallerist-dealer Ashish Anand at Rs 10 lakh).

“India doesn’t have a history of collectors of film memorabilia,” said Tuli, “but I can guarantee you that a year-and-a-half from now, if the same collection comes up for auction, it will fetch over Rs 1 crore from the market.”

Clearly, then, to the question whether Indian art prices are plateauing, Tuli says they’re consolidating (but also says the skew where a Rabindranath Tagore sells for Rs 10 lakh while a Jagannath Panda fetches Rs 25 lakh needs to be corrected), while the market for popular culture is just opening up, and books could be the next big opportunity.

But the final word might well have to wait till September when “Rs 200 crore of Indian art” will jostle for buyers at auctions by Osian’s, Saffronart, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonham’s.

Whether any more “world records for Indian art” will be made then will depend on whether collectors who seem to have taken a breather in the dizzy market turn competitive again.

“After all,” says Tuli, “there are only a handful of collectors who will pay over Rs 1 crore for a painting.”

narendra pal singh's Panchatattva

narendra pal singh's Panchatattva
by Vedprakash bhardwaj








There are a lot of young painters in India who are in search of right identity, but quite a few are able to carve a niche for themselves in this world of cut-throat competition. Narendra Pal Singh is one of them. Born in a small village in 1963, he is settled in Delhi. In fact, right through his every exhibition, his creativity and credibility comes to the fore. Being a Bachelor in Fine Art, he could have turned out to be a great believer in fine technique of his artistic training. But the artistic soul and mind in him revealed that art is not only fusion of skill and technique in swirl of colour, but more important, it is the expression of mundane experiences of life’s primeval love and affection.Even after moving over to the national capital, Delhi, Narendra Pal Singh is very much tied to his roots and traditional influences. His native state of Bihar still haunts and beckons him. Art critic and admirer call him as an odd man out in the crowd and also an oddity in vibrant art market. Without shunning principles of market economy, he has maintained a fair bit of gravity and thus commands a great market in India and abroad.

For me, it was 1993, which turned out to the maiden meeting with him and it took me no time to notice gradual rise of striking attraction in his works. Over the years, he went on to hone his brush skill on canvas. In his early life, he was inclined to figurative form of creation, but slowly and steadily he drifted in the world of abstraction. But he still denies any such drift from figure to abstraction in his work. In his view, abstraction is inherent part of his creation right from the very beginning. He said, “ In the beginning, I am to paint monkey series, which is out and out abstraction. I draw two different circle-small and big. Now which one is figure and which one is abstraction poses a question. In fact, I have flair for depicting my surrounding with a subtle touch of difference. For instance, a tree depicted in all other colour but green. Don’t you observe our folk and tribal art showing symbols and motifs of culture and mythology splashed in colour borrowed from fantasy world and in the course of entire process of decoration and embellishments, the very symbol, form, composition, line, shape and motif undergo gradual transformation from figure to abstract.

Nature is central to his art. In addition to natural impressions in his figure and abstraction, he also brings a fair element of folklore. Uma Nair, noted art critic once observed, “Imagine an artist who love folklore, and inhabits the hamlets of rural dusty India and watches the contemporary Indian women who partakes of the globalization frenzy and still hangs onto rituals and customs of the yesteryear. Narnedra Pal Singh is all of that and a little more because into his singular observations of the myths and reality of today’s world, he encapsulates the irony of being caught in a time warp”.In fact, sense of commitment and dedication to his ritualistic upbringing persuades him to avoid experimentation with Kitsch art. A serious look at his repertoire reveals a perfect blend of past and present, rural and urban sensibilities just as localization meets globalisation in his journey from form to abstraction.One of his most famous series, La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life)- inspired by legendary filmmaker Fellini’s The Clowns received rave reviews. Unforgettable are his indigenous impressions from Western clowns, entirely with touch of things and moods Indian. Not only combination of colours and bold lines, range of unique motif in subtle sense inspire awe among viewers. Clowns funny in disposition and full of myriad emotions and sentiments bring alive childhood sentiments to the fore. In his recent series based on Mahabharata, there are a great deal of abstractionist situations.

Mahabharata being not only a story and great narrative of human life finds touching impression in his brushworks. After mahabharata he is painting Venice. Last year he visit Italy where his work exhibited. He returns from Italy with full of new ideas and start to paint Italy. In his new paintings he paint Italy in abstraction. But very soon, italys hangover is over and narendra tourn to panchtattva. He says `After my exhibition “Drishtikon” in which I ventured into the abstracted genre it is as if I have arrived at a testing ground for departure - a departure that is born out of the knowledge of destruction that seems rampant and widespread. All around me I see the destruction of all those elements of the Panchatattva - the signs of several parallel processes of gestation, birth, and inevitable destruction - a certain process by which various carnal impulses are translated into images, everywhere: I see hands strangely disembodied in a box of consumerist wants; maquettes of filth and garbage, plastic and construction material used for mega malls strewn about in varying degrees of composition; steel and iron, stone and marble, rope and cement all contend with each other in a discreet warfare of cut-throat consumerism.’

His current exhibition ‘panchatattava’ presented by gallery alternatives at shredharani art gallery, new delhi from july 19 to july 28 and after that exhibition will be shift at gallery alternatives, a22/8 dlf city phese-1, gurgaon.

Decoding urban realities

George Martin's painting


Manil Gupta's painting


Decoding urban realities

by Vedprakash bhardwaj

Total sold out before opening is great news for an artist at age 28 and 33. It’s happened at palette art gallery, New Delhi on 8th July. Palette exhibits two young artist Manil Gupta and George martin p j titled Encode-Decode. both are represent young Indian art community. They are not only modern artist but also post-modern artist in their style and thought. They focus on present life on different Engel’s. Virtual world reflects in their creations in many manners.

Artist Manil Gupta just passed out art collage in 2003. He is an artist with a different eye. Comics like characters are playing on his canvas and explore contemporary life, which controlled by technology that create by human but control to human. This techno-reality is our present and might be future also.

He deals with the urban society and his different faces. Contradictions and conflicts of modern play on his canvases, upper class and lower class are existed same time, and Manil deal with their different situation. He does not give any direct massage in his work. He just tries to represent the nature of human society and events of day-to-day life. His work, like ‘and one fine day… it will all be over’, ‘the forced ritual’ and ‘the mockery of our hollow lives’ are good examples of conceptual art.

George Martin p j focuses on urban life also. We face a kind of computer language in his work which is very attractive. He uses vibrant colours in a cinematic style. Some time he paints a figure but mostly he use figures as a symbols. He travel between Reality and hyper realities and find some god reason to paint his world in which he live.

Structure : Cityscape - Somenath Maity (Solo exhibition)

Mahua Art Gallery presents "Structure - Cityscape" - a collection of oil paintings in which artist Somenath Maity layers his canvasses with vibrant landscapes in a mass of ascending vertical accumulations. As one explores the canvasses, one discovers familiar sights and images: street nooks, lighted windows, railings, heights, a blue starry night merging with the contradictory emotions of hope and vulnerability that are always present in a city.

Somenath Maity born in 1960 at Midnapore in West Bengal, Somenath Maity studied Fine Arts at the College of Visual Arts in Kolkatta. After obtaining his degree here, Maity receive a diploma in Fine Arts from the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, also in Kolkatta.

Somenath Maity’s favorite occupation is to find the inner beauty that exists in every big city and that most people don’t see. Maity express this inner beauty in his abstract oils on canvas. He builds up his paintings, all aptly titled "structure". His colors and textures are very strong. Viewers find a vibration of an abstraction, and the colors like red, blue, brown and other. Maity is one of Bengal's important new emerging painters. He has already exhibited his works at many major Indian and European galleries.

Exhibition start from 7th July 2006 at Mahua - The Art Gallery, Leela Galleria (Bangalore).

pallete art gallery presents : encode-decode