Delhi: Everything you need to see and experience at the India Art Fair

India Art Fairis the leading platform to discover modern and contemporary art from South Asia and, is a portal to the region's cultural landscape. The event takes place annually in Delhi and draws galleries, artists, private foundations, arts charities, artists' collectives, and national institutions. Here's a look at some of the top participating galleries and institutions this year.

BUILDING ON SUCCESS

Director Jagdip Jagpal who has created her own insignia with a focussed, tighter curation states: “The 2020 edition will be my third as Fair Director and I am keen to continue building on the successes of previous years. Returning to NSIC Grounds, New Delhi, this year's fair will retain a strong focus and connection to its home base, with 70% floorspace dedicated to leading India and South Asian galleries and artists, private foundations and arts charities, artists' collectives, national institutions, cultural events and festivals. At the same time, we are proud to welcome a selection of top international exhibitors who have demonstrated long-term commitment to the region and will bring important works by artists who have never or rarely shown before.”

GALLERIES

Jhaveri Contemporary

Jhaveri Contemporary presents a delightful set of paintings and prints and sculptural works by the renowned Lubna Chowdhry from London. Ceramic ingenuity comes alive in Chowdhry's sculptural objects and site-specific artworks. Then, there is the versatileRana Begum的绘画有一个短暂的质量。她磨破ks with compositions that explore geometry, colour and light. Light reflects and absorbs on fluorescent coloured surfaces to create changing sensations as viewers move in and around her works and the space they occupy. She is inspired by urban architecture and her childhood memories of the geometric patterns of traditional Islamic art and architecture.

Chatterjee & Lal

The Chatterjee & Lal booth will showcase points of connection between artists who often worked in very different time periods. For instance, they will be displaying works by Nikhil Chopra (b. 1974) alongside those by Rustom Siodia (1881-1946). In addition to these two artists, they will also have Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Nasreen Mohamedi, Nityan Unnikrishnan, Riten Mozumdar, and Sahej Rahal.

Vadehra Art Gallery

Vadehra Art Gallery brings a slew of works that give insights into millennial movements. Sachin George, the genius with scissors and paper creates a boxed installation of a flower created with cut archival paper. Sudhir Patwardhan's Light Rain is a statement on the street views in Mumbai. Ranbir Kaleka mixes a digital print with oil and collage to create an evocative Man with Quilt that brings into the frame the dualities of contradictions in living. Also deeply impressionable are the two works by Gigi Scaria's bronze and Faiza Butt's underglaze on porcelain The Great Gamble.

DAG

DAG will have a retinue of India's Moderns in their enviable list of masters that hark back 100 years. From magnificent works by Sohan Qadri and J Swaminathan India's abstract guru who set up Bharat Bhavan to Prabhakar Barwe Jamini Roy and many more, this suite will be a joy to behold.

是否受到民族主义热情,笨人ly the urge to experiment, artists began to move away from academic realism to a stylised revivalism and, later, more expressionistic tropes, before making way for the revolutionary language of the Progressives and their subsequent peers. Indian art peaked and ebbed but was never less than distinctive, reflecting social concerns and polity, moving from lyricism to distortion, from subversiveness to sarcasm, from figurative to abstract, and encompassing within its range a nation's history that changed from that of a colony to independence and democracy, from the ruled to self-rule, and the myriad paths it has chosen to arrive at today.

Pichvai Tradition and Beyond

Lotuses, cows and the dark eyed Lord Krishna, Pichvai Tradition and Beyond will reveal the kingdom of the gods and reflect the inherent flexibility within traditional art, of temple forms, that are commercially viable. This atelier works with over 50 artists, and various tradespeople of the community. They will showcase the re-interpretation of the Pichvai tradition art form in terms of scale, and, getting pichvais done as miniatures. The atelier caters to urban collectors, celebrating the intensity of detailed frame-within-frame styles in borders. It also draws attention to the Deccani pichvai form—many artists migrated southwards during Mughal rule, picking up foiling techniques from there. Here we will see soothing greys, deep indigos and blacks, and regale in Nathdwara and Pichvai nostalgia.

Gallery Threshold

a. Spiritual by artist V Ramesh V. Ramesh has developed a distinctive narrative vocabulary rooted in our sacred and literary culture. His work titled Wilted Stalks executed in water colour, gouache and acid free paper, is compose of a Raja Ravi Varma Lithograph in the back drop, and wilted rosebud stalks in the foreground. The artist recalls that in 2013 he did a show based on Raja Ravi Varma's Lithographs. “I realised he was trying not just mythological and religious images, but he was trying redefining the idea of Indian beauty,” says Ramesh. It was only recently that he realised that perhaps this is a whole lot of factors like cinema, fashion attire that define our ideas of beauty.

b. Dexterous by artists Shaurya Kumar, Achia Anzi, Rajendar Tiku and Rubaba Haider

Shaurya Kumar - I am a citizen of that ruined place (144” x 6”, Porcelain) Much as Meer Taqi Meer in the 18th century laments about the monumental loss of culture, shift of power and ruination of his home—Delhi, Shaurya echoes the same sentiment in the 21st century where moments of the past again seem to reverberate. The work reflects on a place, a city, a state, a country that was once a thriving cultural hub, where only the chosen lived, a place that was looted by the heavens and left desolate, and has now become a ruined place.

Achia Anzi - Untitled (Mixed Media), size site specific The work is indicative of the donation box in the synagogue, a charity box, where one donates the money to the world. However, it is also indicative of the locked and abandoned house. Besides, the lock upon the door has a spiritual meaning—it is a quest for a higher reality, that is guarded and blocked.

c. Theme: Abstract Art by Pandit Khairnar, Rahul Imandar and Sebastian Varghese

Pandit Khainar - Untitled - Oil on Canvas

He uses layer-upon-layer of oil paint to create evocations of fascinating shades of light, like quiet music. Through his paintings, he describes his memories spent in idyllic fields and attempts to recapture that point between twilight and dusk when the light changes in a few seconds and the open sky is a hue of myriad colours, intangible and mystic.

Emami Art

Emami Art unveils Anjan Modak, an alumnus of Rabindra Bharti University. A virtuoso in the usage of ink, graphite, and watercolour on paper, artist Anjan Modak's artwork reflects the precarious effects of extensive development on our habitat, such as the rapid and historic transformation of human social roots on a global scale, whereby predominantly rural culture is being rapidly replaced by predominantly urban culture.

Apparao Galleries

D Dahsan's mixed media works echo the symbolism of shunya as well as the eternal aura of the circle. In modern day terms, it is the textural timbre and the tenor of materiality that will attract art lovers to his showcasing multiple renderings and moorings to celebrate the power and manifestation of forms. For example, Dhasan uses design as an allegory to create concentric as well as circular and elliptical arrangements. As you study the elements, you find that there is a cohesive condensing, a slow exchange between the atmosphere and the evanescent yet indicate mood of creating islands of thought around it.

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke(孟买)

Ratheesh T, another emerging name creates intensely moving and powerful canvasses that examines the self, life, death, family and nature. His paintings evoke range in space and time, blurring the distinction between the imagined and the real, between past and present. Revealed in his works, are the contemporary possibilities of the classic—the tangible qualities of form, light, colour and texture and the intangible ones of high imagination, subtle evocation and an intrinsic acknowledgment of all that is unknowable.

Platform

Under Platform viewers will find rich sources of inspiration from bodies like Delhi Crafts Council and Nepal Picture Library.

The Delhi Crafts Council will draw visitors with works like the Tree of Life by Chanchal Chakroborty. Many crafts have evolved in modern times into new products using the same craft practices and are finding new expressions to suit contemporary needs. There is a great variety of styles showing the creative ability of the artisans to adapt to new markets needs. The processes evolved from time immemorial have remained the same but products will give us a bird's eye view into the richness of the craft sojourn.

Last year the Nepal Picture Library presented a suite of memories from Dalit: A Quest for Dignity and Public Life of a Woman: A Feminist Memory Project. This time too they will delve into their archive of over 70,000 photographs from various private and organisational sources across Nepal and give us an insight into their repository for materials that can secure a multicultural and pluralist representation of Nepali history.

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

KNMA creates an epic trio of exhibitions to create engagement with important woman artists in contemporary art practice. Zarina: a solo exhibition ‘A Life in Nine Lines' unveils Zarina's lithe lucid, linearity and her prowess as an artist of deeper insights and design dictates. Also watch out for Nepali Paper Shadow 2006 that echoes dulcet squares. The second part looks at women and the language of abstraction in the South Asian context. Lala Rukh's works that were shown overseas, create an ethos of elegance. Prabhavathi Meppayil's subtle assiduous gestures that were shown by GallerySKE create us an aura of calm. Meppayil's integration of craft-based labour and process-based art positions her work in unique dialogue with a complex history of material and artistic production. Bangladeshi artist Ayesha Sultana showcased in Art Basel by Experimenter Gallery is represented by her works that explore the rich variety of greys that graphite offers, as well as the transience of the medium that quickly takes on a life of its own unless carefully sealed. While these works are minimalist and exude their own quietude, it is the final set of works in Abstracting Nature by Mrinalini Mukherjee and Jayashree Chakravarty that draw us into a study of early reckonings. Chakravarty's Alien Sphere and Untitled are emotive emblems of a refined aesthetic. Her handling and fine detailing is reminiscent of textural timbres and fractional botanic hues.

INSTITUTIONS

Rhode Island School of Design: Building Ruins

In a historic debut the Rhode Island School of Design alumni will present a powerful collective of works that echo their ingenuity and brilliance in the world of art and design spatialities. Building Ruins aims to regenerate/re-energise a collective archive of objects and ideas by RISD practitioners that demonstrates the inherently interrogative, and, more importantly, ever-mutable, nature of creative endeavours. Through this living [far from static] archive, the curatorial ambition of the show is to present the methodology of enquiry embedded within the practices of RISD alumni in India.

It takes a closer look at their engagement with a range of materials, techniques and processes that they constantly seek to rethink, reapply and reinvent. Building Ruins offers the possibility of exploring the play between the complete and the incomplete, permanent and impermanent, assembly and dismantling, fragments and wholes or even preservation and decay. The project inevitably demands a reoriented tracing of a past into a present re-focussed through the lens of this group exhibit. Among artists are Aparajita Jain Mahajan ,Raghvi Bhatia, Mekhala Behl, Ishrat Sahgal, Taniya Vaidya, Shonan Trehan, Cynthia Director, Aditya Dutta & Mehr.

Chennai Photo Biennale

Among institutions at the fair, the Chennai Photo Biennale booth will portray its explorations as a transcultural team, trying to understand different approaches to photography even as it opens up myriad ways of mapping the city. In an interview, one of the curators P. Bhooma said: “We are conscious of the fact that we are engaging with photography as a medium when it is the most accessible, and what that means.”

In the past, one of CPB's highlights has been its success in re-awakening the city to its heritage spaces. Public spaces and forgotten heritage will once again be a focus for CPB in 2020. Displaying archival material will be one of its mainstays as they enliven the fair with their own primacy and inventive insignia.

India Art Fair 2020 runs till February 2 at NSIC, Delhi

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