Bhopal: Some big names from Bhopal feature in the exhibition now on (till Oct 1) at Akar Prakar art gallery. Akhilesh has himself curated this exhibition and the other two well-known names are Seema Ghurayya and Manish Pushkale, whose name, of late, is being bracketed with the most-sought-after of Indian contemporary art stars.
Grey is the dominant colour of Akhilesh’s small works in which tiny rectangles of this shade are piled on top of each other, brick fashion. In the second, the same rectangles are being shuffled like a pack of cards.
Ribbons of light grey or sepia flash against the background of black or a darker shade of brown in Seema Ghurayya’s paintings. Manish Pushkale creates a gauzy effect on the canvas with crosses reclining on their side. Pushkale may be in the news but hopefully not for a mediocre work like this.
In none of these canvases does a recognizable object, scenery or a living figure appear. This is in keeping with the title of the exhibition — Amurta, or non-figurative. The exhibition offers quite a wide variety of abstract works.
The inclusion of M.F. Husain’s early work depicting nudes may, therefore, be questioned here. True their faces are not visible but the breasts and thighs are unmistakably a woman’s. Oblique references to living things are one thing — as in Swaminathan’s angular birds — but Husain’s is a purely figurative work.
Swaminathan had conceived and built Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, and his watercolours of birds made up of simple geometric shapes are charming without being cute.
Bendre’s bulbul in one corner of the canvas is a typical example of this artist’s version of pointillism. It is painstakingly stippled but ends up looking sweetly sentimental. Some Bhopal artists such as Akhilesh are close to Raza, and his black and rainbow-coloured painting displayed here is one of his more sombre works.
Bright red is the dominant shade of Mohan Malviya’s canvases, on which he creates large tribal craft-inspired geometric designs. Anil Gaikwad creates vistas that resemble islands floating on a red or green sea. A forest seems to be afloat in Awdhesh Vajpai’s work. Gaikwad and Vajpai have much in common in the way they conceive their work, and that can be quite tiresome.
By contrast, Avadhesh Yadav’s (picture) crinkled paper-effect created with paint looks more interesting. One can almost visualize Siraj Saxena stabbing the surface of the canvas to conjure up bird’s eye views of farm land – finely articulated areas of green, yellow and orange.
Rafique Shah’s cat’s cradle of what looks like refracted light was more imaginative.
Source: Telegraph News
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