ENGENDERED IN ASSOCIATION WITH INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE EXPLORES THE ADVENT OF ABSTRACTION AS BOTH A HISTORICAL IDEA AND A CONSTANTLY EMERGENT ARTISTIC PRACTICE USING THE FULCRUM OF AN INTERGENERATIONAL INTERVENTIONIST EXHIBITION.
Set Adrift on Memory Bliss: Meditations on the age of creativity, art and memory, brings together 7 influential artistic practices in encounter with imminent geometric abstractionist SK Sahni’s prolific body of work spanning five decades. The exhibition works towards a broad cross- disciplinary examination of abstraction’s inherent radicality, its oppositional and critical possibilities around creativity, the queerness of time and the marginalities of ‘age’.
Artists: Shobha Broota, Puneet Kaushik, Reshmi Dey, Anumeha Jain, Harshit Agrawal, Adil Kalim, Indranil Garai & Associates in dialog with SK Sahni. Curated by Myna Mukherjee, June 6, 2024–June 18, 2024.
Prologue
‘Does Creativity Change as We Age? As Turner lay dying, he asked to see sunlight. Renoir demanded a pencil. For many artists, the final chapter is the most creative. Claude Monet’s contemporaries decried his Water Lilies series as ‘artistic suicide’, a symptom of cataracts and advanced age. In Turner’s final two decades, as he painted the weather, both natural and manmade, in his increasingly abstract landscapes, he found himself brutalized by peers, a kind of aesthetic elder abuse. Today, it’s doubtful that most gallery patrons know that Monet was in his seventies when he created the most famous paintings in his Water Lilies series. Turner’s late creations are now widely recognized as works of incomparable brilliance. The same could be said of art from Cézanne, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and closer to home Gaitonde. Time … friend or nemesis?
It depends on who you ask. When we’re young, time propels us ever forward. As we age, time begins to feel different, more finite, less predictable, sometimes like a rainbow muted by shadow. The difference in how young people externalize time versus how elders internalize it can be as vast as a desert. But as common ground, most artists relish the present as a liminal space of possibility, doing whatever it takes to transpose experience into art. But existential questions arise: How does creativity accommodate age? What are the benefits of aging when your body and mind begin to occupy alternate spaces? How does one adapt to these changes? What’s lost? What’s gained? How does creativity persist? To be old, (anyone over the age of, say, sixty-five) is to be in many people’s minds less effective, less engaged, less productive. In a word, marginal: a cultural bias exacerbated by economics and politics. It may well be that artistic creativity is one of the last bastions where any individual, regardless of age, can still impact the cultural realm and abstraction may be the aging individual’s most profound response to the limits and uncertainties of existence.’
NEW DELHI, June 6, 2024– Set adrift on Memory Bliss, Meditations on the age of creativity, art and memory on view at India International Centre from June 6-18 2023, explores the advent of abstraction as both a historical idea and a constantly emergent artistic practice, underscoring the idea that abstraction is constantly being redefined across every generation. Using the fulcrum of an intergenerational interventionist style, the exhibition is a sweeping survey of more than 200 artworks from 7 artistic bodies of production, in encounter with imminent geometric abstractionist SK Sahni’s prolific body of work spanning five decades. Different artists in different locales with different philosophical foundations traversing a broad range of mediums and materials—including paintings, drawings, prints, glass blown sculptures, AI explorations, queerness, site specific installations, recordings, music & even food art, ‘the exhibition intersects works that vary in their force and aesthetic complexity, their heterogeneity, even incoherence, but together embrace a radical contemporary moment in the present that allows for a more nuanced reading of abstraction in both form and philosophy says curator Myna Mukherjee.
The exhibition mirrors the roots of the ideology where the shift from iconography to abstraction marked a resistance to a contemporary assimilationist politics centered on legibility. Thus the limitlessness of abstraction” is as queer as postmodernism. Proponents of abstraction will understand it as a method to explore questions of embodiment, relationality, time and materiality without resorting to an established, and perhaps reified, iconography.
Often times the artist in representation is inescapably culturally marked. Abstraction is one tactic for refusing the power of this marking and for resisting the visual taxonomies through which people are recognized and regulated. SK Sahni, diasporic and prolific at 87, diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Cancer, lends both his body of work and himself as the artist remarkably to abstraction by breaking all stereotypes of productivity and age. He emerges every day to his studio and creates art with the passion of a dreamer and A significant amount of work in the show is new and created in the past two years post his diagnosis of Parkinson’s and gradual dementia. About his art as Roobina Karode writes in an essay on his work “He has spent more than five decades of his life, chasing the line as his constructive tool to create his world of geometric abstractions. One is aware that a straight line does not exist in nature. It is an abstraction, something invented by humans as a tool for measure, delineation, rendition and expression. For Sahni, it is an extraordinary tool to envision the beauty of form and structure by defying the conventional sense of the picture plane, with a single vantage and vanishing point and the line of horizon.” An artist like Sahani has followed different styles and mediums over his long career, working as a print maker and figurative artist in the first half of his career and then turning to abstraction and minimalism. Having started out as a figurative painter after having studied at the JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, he soon moved to drawing biomorphic forms, playing with the spontaneity of the hand and the informality of organic lines and eventually moved to what he is most known for minimal linear abstractions in space with the precision of architectural draftsmanship and a sublimation of tantric geometry. His work is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Geometry in Dallas (USA), private collections and several corporate acquisitions both in the East and the West.
Senior artist Shobha Broota’s (born 1943) ‘woven paintings’ are an exploration of colour and texture. Broota stretches knitted wool over canvas, producing intriguing patterns and subtle variations that create a sense of rhythm and a complex, meditative surface. These works are an experience of material and explore the abstract nature of expression through fabric, since her early days Shoba has worked across genres and engaged with various mediums. Broota has since developed her art into a form of meditation, as she believes that the blank canvas must be approached with a clean and uncluttered mind. We see this manifest in her work that touches upon her deeper exploration of herself through mediums like thread, wool and other materials. It is this aspect of her work that connects up to Sahani’s work capturing the conversation with minimalism, materiality and biomorphic form.
Puneet Kaushik (born 1972) is an artist whose is intensely personal, defining abstract expression in his emotional, mental and social space. While he draws on multiple sources like folk and tribal art, design he also expresses his contemporary explorations of materials like handmade paper, wire, fabric and weaving techniques. His works take off from his fascination with the human body in all its visceral detail, including an abundant use of the colour red. He also addresses larger issues of existence and space through his installation work that explores linearity and minimal forms. He enunciates scale in his sculptural work through his delicate use of wire-mesh along with traditional textiles and materials. He manifests duality through a fine balance of light and shadow, gravity and lightness, silence and speech, and most importantly, of the inner and outer self. This exploration of the self through linearity is what speaks to Sahani’s more linear expressions and it is here that the dialogue begins between the two artists, through their work.
Reshmi Dey (1975?) is an abstract artist who brings her exploration of the abstract to glass art. Dey began as a math and economics teacher, but she soon turned her back on teaching as a profession and dived wholeheartedly into art. She engaged with intense effort with the generations- old business families of Firozabad, the “Glass Capital” of India to hone her proficiency with the medium. She took her journey with glass further when she embarked on a formal training in glass techniques and technology with a specialization in hot glass blowing at The International Glass Centre in Dudley, United Kingdom. She now has a studio in the Capital where she shares her extensive insight and experience of over one decade in the creative glass industry. In this body of work she explores glass as a biomorphic form in a large format work that speaks to Sahani’s biomorphic forms, in a three-dimensional format. The delicacy of glass is explored while brining to the medium a multiplicity of physical and emotional qualities.
Indranil Garai (1977) is a cross-disciplinary artist who works with the Pune Architectural firm, to bring about a dialogue between art and design. His concepts inspire channels of meaningful exchange and a seamless transition of ideas between art and human kind. He is also an entrepreneur who founded the Indranil Garai and Associates (IGA) in 2009 which is one of the largest art consultancies in the Country that creates sculptures solely for public spaces. Indranil believes that art is a commitment that transcends definitions, known parameters, and dimensions of space and time to negotiate and result in a deep bond with society. His works featured in this exhibition brings a minimal expression to form that is geometric and precise yet illusionistic, all aspects that are essayed in Sahani’s more recent work.
Anumeha Jain (1982) a promising abstract artist from New Delhi. She finds inspiration in the dynamic colors and movements of the ‘universe’. In her artistic exploration, she delves into the intertwined nature of life and death, perceiving their constant coexistence. Every moment becomes a canvas for the birth and passing of cells, mirroring the unfolding events in the world. The internal exploration of form that her work engages in speaks well to Sahani’s biomorphic period where the formlessness of colour and form leads to an exploration of energy. Jain’s work explores this unveiling her inner-world—One that is destroyed only to be born again.
Harshit Agarwal in Collaboration with Dhoomimal Collection An artist known to work with Artificial intelligence, Harshit’s latest venture brings a historical aspect to the brand new medium of AI. Harshit (b.1992) is an artist working with artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Through his practice, Harshit explores what he calls the ‘human-machine creativity continuum’- the melding of human and machine creative agency. In this body of work he explores looking at iconic abstract artists in India and counterpoising them with abstract artists in the West as well along with Indian Diaspora. His intention is to have a commentary on an AI, interacting with Dhoomimal’s collection of abstraction including S H Raza, Gaitonde, Sohan Quadri, and more.
Adil Kalim’s work can be seen as a queering of queer art. Working in abstract expressionism, often considered hostile to identity politics, Adil firmly embraces his identity as Muslim queer person and insists on prompting queer aesthetics to reconsider its preferred means of self- representation for a more nuanced conversation about form as such. He argues that if queerness can be too easily “read” on its surface, then it can homogenized, trivialized, and perhaps commodified.
There will be a series of events during the course of the exhibition including a chef’s table on food and abstraction, presented by first Indian/South Asian woman Michelin star awarded chef Surbhi Sahni.
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