PRESS RELEASE*
Group Show
THE GALLERY COLLECTION
Artsindia Gallery, NY
December 8 2006 – January 15, 2007
Opening reception, December 8, 6–9pm
The Gallery Collection is ArtsIndia's seasonal offering of the a selection of the galleries most prized pieces. This December, the cultivated panoply that is contemporary Indian art is manifest in the gallery collection. Ranging from elegant to rustic, agitated to sublime, abstract to surreal to social realist, these works are diverse in the stylistic discourses and visions of truth with which they engage, yet binding in their juxtaposition.
Anjolie Ela Menon earned a degree in English from Delhi University and studied art in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts from 1961-62. During her time in Europe, Menon was influenced by her exposure to medieval Christian artists and began to experiment with their techniques. As her style evolved, Menon utilized the style of early Christian art but took as its subject the female nude. The result is a dynamic interplay of eroticism and melancholy. Menon has developed her own personal iconography of distance and loss.
Laxma Goud was born in Nizampur, Andhra Pradesh, in 1940. Having secured a diploma in drawing and painting from the Government College of Art and Architecture, Hyderabad, in 1963, he studied mural painting and printmaking at M.S. University, Baroda. By the late Sixties, he evolved a distinct style in his etchings, which reflected a pan-natural sexuality seen in terms of impulsive, aggressive passions. He interpreted childhood memories of rural and tribal vivacity through a sophisticated urban grid in which surreal, libidinal tones mingled with fantasy and poetry. Goud's characters reveal an expressionist note whose harshness is tampered by the linear details and dark palpable textures. By the late Seventies, when he resorted largely to the subtler medium of aquatint, his figures softened and became more direct as well as evocative. In 1975, Goud did delicate pencil drawings of junk objects in close-ups, isolate yet bearing an imprint of people who use them. In the mid 80s, colors and geometrication entered those images. Subsequently, the silhouetting stroke became smoother, simpler and pliant. Goud lives and works in Hyderabad.
M. F. Husain was born in Sholapur, Maharashtra, in 1915. In his youth, he studied calligraphy, which has been his only formal artistic training. At twenty two, Husain moved to Mumbai to be a painter of hoardings advertising Hindi movies for a living. For a brief period afterwards, he designed toys and children's nursery furniture. Husain began painting seriously in the 1940s. From his humble beginnings, Husain has risen to become perhaps the most celebrated icon of the Indian art world. In 1947, Husain co-founded the Bombay Progressives along with F N Souza and S H Raza. Albeit the Progressives quick dissolution as a collective, Husain's career, as well of those of his compatriots, continued to flourish. They took Indian art toward a sense of resolution with Western Modernism, appropriating the latter while bringing to their work new sensibilities and a sense of the strength and dignity of the indigenous past. Husain's incorporates the visual language of Abstract Expressionism and Cubism into his figural compositions. At the same time, his intense hues evoke indigenous pigments, and his facile rendering of crisp, monumental forms on flat, shallow space source India's courtly artistic traditions. Moreover, he engages the Indian imagination, depicting its mythology and historical themes. In 1971, Husain exhibited alongside Picasso at the Sao Paulo Biennale. He had been awarded some of India's highest honors, including the Padma Shree, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.
G. R. Santosh was born in Srinagar, Kashmir in 1929. Santosh studied painting at the MS University, Baroda from 1954-1956. Following a spiritual reformation in 1965, Santosh began to build his artistic expression and reputation based on the the Kashmir Shaiva and Tantra philosophies- materiality and ephemerality of physical pleasure and phenomena. Santosh generally used a square and a trident to symbolize his tantric or Shaivite symbol. Whatever Santosh painted, the artist said, came to as him naturally as his breathing- unconsciously. Eventually, Santosh combined the male and female in a pure image of the human form. During his career, G.R. Santosh held over 30 one-man shows. In 1973, he received the Lalit Kala Academy award and in 1977, he was awarded the Padma Shri. The artist died in 1997.
For more information and visuals please contact:
ArtsIndia Gallery, 206 5th Avenue, Fifth Floor, between 25th & 26th St.
T: (212) 725-6092; F: (212) 725-6096, newyork@aicongallery.com
www.aicongallery.com