Press Release
MODERN FOLK
The Folk Art Roots of the Modernist Avant-Garde
Featuring works by Sakti Burman, Laxma Goud, Nalini Malani, Jamini Roy, Ravinder Reddy, Nilima Sheikh,
KG Subramanyan, J Swaminathan, and T Vaikuntam
Aicon Gallery, New York: 29 April – 22 May 2010
VIP Preview: Thursday 29 April, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Curatorial discussion: "From Peasant Painting to Pop Art in Modern China", 7:00pm
Dr. Robert Harrist, Chairman of the Department of Art History, Columbia University
Aicon Gallery New York is delighted to present MODERN FOLK, a group exhibition featuring selected work from the masters of modern Indian art. This exhibition examines the point of convergence and intellectual synergy between the (Western) Modernist avant-garde movement and (Indian) indigenous and tribal folk art.
Artists featured in this exhibition are those of a number of Indian artists who throughout the 20th century have warned against taking Western Modernism as a privileged yardstick. The legendary Jamini Roy, for example, turned away from the post-impressionism of his early works. Later, J Swaminathan started the magazine 'Contra' in 1966 with a cri de coeur to reverse the trend of Indian artists looking for the "back slaps of art snobs, especially those in Paris, London, and New York". Swaminanthan, like KG Subramanyan before him, and Roy before that, instead turned to India's indigenous folk and tribal culture.
In doing so, all these artists articulated a very peculiar art historical twist; for as recent academic debates in the West have observed, Western modernist avant-gardes themselves, from Cubists to Surrealists, owed a large debt to non-Western folk and tribal art through the process of 'borrowing' – now termed 'Primitivism'. In a sense, modernists both in the West and in India were turning to the same sources but from different registers.
From this point of view it seems perverse for artists working in India through the 20th century to privilege Western modernism when the visual and cultural phenomena that the Western avant-garde drew on were alive and well in the ongoing folk and tribal traditions of India. And it is from this point of view that one can go on to provide an analytical framework to understand the work of artists who range from Jamini Roy, working at the beginning of the 20th century, through to the contemporary artist Ravinder Reddy – this is the framework of this show, 'Modern Folk'.
The result of this peculiar twist is that Indigenous folk references and international modernism are wrapped around each other in the work of artists in this show. K Laxma Goud's works deliberately hover between indigenous folk art and Picasso's use of non-Western tribal imagery; Sakti Burman segues seamlessly between Hindu visual imagery and Western avant-garde explorations of the unconsciousness; Indian and European mythologies are both referenced in Nalini Malani's work. Modernity thus is not located in a privileged Western narrative, but paradoxically in that set of references which was for a long time air-brushed in Western art history; non-Western, indigenous art traditions.