Aicon Gallery http://www.aicongallery.com/ Aicon Gallery News en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss exhibit-E.com Signed MF Husain Serigraphs from the Herwitz Collection http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2009_signed-mf-husain-serigraphs-from-the-herwitz-collection/ http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2009_signed-mf-husain-serigraphs-from-the-herwitz-collection/
M F Husain
BLANKETING (Mother Teresa Series)
Limited edition serigraph (edition of 300)
individual serigraph $2,000; set of 3 $5,000
17 x 22 in.

2009
Aicon Gallery

Aicon Gallery is offering a unique opportunity to collect hand signed serigraphs from the Herwitz collection. For details please contact newyork@aicongallery.com. ]]> Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:00:58 EST Up Above the World: Contemporary South Asian Photography - Featuring: Atul Bhalla, Sanjay Bhattacharyya, Sanjeet Chowdhury, Anita Dube, Pooja Iranna, Vidya Kamat, Jatinder Marwaha, Huma Mulji, Akbar Padamsee, Raghu Rai, Iqra Tanveer and Santosh Verma http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-05-10_up-above-the-world-contemporary-south-asian-photography/ http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-05-10_up-above-the-world-contemporary-south-asian-photography/
Raghu Rai
Sleeping Dreams, Tagore Castle Street, Kolkata
2004
Digital scan of photographic negative on archival paper
54 x 20 in.

May 10 - June 22, 2013
Aicon Gallery

PRESS RELEASE

Aicon Gallery, New York is pleased to present Up Above the World, a group exhibition featuring twelve Contemporary photographers documenting the rapidly changing South Asian socio-economic landscape and its ever-shifting impacts on issues ranging from the personal to the global. The exhibition looks back though the history of post-independence Indian and Pakistani photography, from the now iconic images of Indian society in motion by Magnum photographer Raghu Rai to conceptual artist Atul Bhalla’s documentation of his epic performances seeking to balance our collective contemporary needs and responsibilities with our shared history and its consequences. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the work here, taken as a whole, presents a vast panoramic view of South Asia’s complex past, present and future through the vision of a group of artists more varied than encompassing and rooted, both individually and collectively, in the worlds and issues they’re seeking to interpret and present.

Raghu Rai, India’s pre-eminent photographer for nearly half a century, has focused on candid snapshots of the whole of India that masterfully capture the country’s ever-evolving regional, cultural and political transformations. Nominated to Magnum Photos by the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, his work challenges viewers to confront a country where temporalities merge and people, animals, and buildings come together in a majestic visual symphony representative of the complex and often-chaotic tableaux of modern Indian life.

Sanjeet Chowdhury, a filmmaker by profession, began taking photographs during his college days in Kolkata in the late 1980s. His photographic work often highlights the rich, yet sometimes jarring, intermingling of India’s multiple pasts and divided present. Discarded Greek statuary, left behind by the British, mixes with discarded Hindu deities and Mughal figures, while makeshift scaffolding stands thinly veiled behind huge advertisements for slick consumer products. Chowdhury’s work draws attention to the ubiquitous cultural and economic contrasts so embedded in today’s urban India that their rich origins and complex contemporary implications are often completely overlooked.

Engaged with the shared environmental and ethical concerns of a new generation, Atul Bhalla is a conceptual artist who examines this new generation’s relationship to water and its cultural meaning. Bhalla’s works are universally pertinent, examining both our individual and collective relationships with the elements necessary for our very existence. Bhalla’s art addresses issues of contemporary needs versus consequent roles of natural, cultural, or built heritage and may be used to decode the contemporary landscape in India by tracing social constructions and discourses in post-independence South Asian society.

Pakistani artist Huma Mulji's work explores the nuances of a post-colonial society in transition. She refers to the experience of 'living 200 years in the past and 30 years in the future all at once' and investigates the visual and cultural overlaps of language, image and taste and their fantastic collisions. Mulji’s photo-based work looks at this phenomenon with a touch of humor to recognize the irony of it, both formally and conceptually. At its core, Mulji’s art examines the pace of cultural change. She breathes life and movement into transformation, rather than dwelling on and following the existing theoretical issues of living and working in a post-colonial nation, opting to apply those stagnant studies to a lived experience.

Critic and art historian Anita Dube began creating art as a result of her association with a group of radical artists from Baroda in the 1980s. Dube’s work, initially concerned with the corporal body and its properties, soon shifted to broader historical and political concerns. Hindu symbols, such as the upside-down “Tree of Life” are prominent motifs in Dube’s work, which deals with issues of mortality, desire, pain and joy. The work draws equally on elements from the present as well as the historical and mythological, while utilizing a variety of materials, including foam, plastic and wire mixed with the human body and bone fragments to evoke the rise, flux and fall of modern industrial structures and societal norms.

Pooja Iranna’s world of artistry is one where structures and textures take focus. Through her work in manipulated photography, she examines the underlying energies of inanimate architectural forms, where repeated and mirrored grid-like structures form nets of reflective landscapes that swell and ripple with the repressed organic labor and force through which they were constructed. Vidya Kamat’s practice is an on-going inquiry into the ways in which the human body (and the attendant complexities of self-hood) is ‘written’ by symbolism. Significance is derived from the layers of meaning that can veil the human body, and the artist suggests that perhaps there can be no understanding outside these layers; no ‘pure’, unmediated relationship to the body.

Jatinder Marwaha uses a flexible and dynamic style for his range of subjects to capture the essence of people and spaces through both studio lighting and location photography. His methods fuse the strengths of both traditional and digital imaging techniques, developing the interactive communication of his portrait and architectural photography through his personal and professional journeys across the world. A contemporary of Raghu Rai as well as an internationally acclaimed photojournalist, Santosh Verma has worked regularly for the past 40-years for The New York Times, Bloomberg, International Herald Tribune and TIME Magazine, among others. Focusing on the collective experience of both subjective and objective elements, Verma is able to reveal starkly intimate portraits and shared moments of pathos with his subjects ranging widely from scenes of urban collapse and industrial exploitation to sublime scenes of religious festivals and agrarian society.


Please contact Aicon Gallery (Amy@Aicongallery.com) for more information. ]]> Wed, 08 May 2013 18:24:58 EST The Happy Servant - Recent Works by Salman Toor http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-05-10_the-happy-servant/ http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-05-10_the-happy-servant/
Salman Toor
THE HAPPY SWEEPER
2013
Oil on canvas
Dia: 24 in.

SOLD



May 10 - June 22, 2013
Aicon Gallery

PRESS RELEASE

Salman Toor | The Happy Servant

May 10th – June 22nd, 2013
Press Preview & Opening Reception: Friday, May 10th, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

35 Great Jones St., New York NY 10012

Aicon Gallery New York is proud to present The Happy Servant, an exhibition of recent works by Salman Toor. Toor’s paintings are an eclectic mix of the exhausted categories of old and new, where inspiration from Old Master painting techniques meld seamlessly with imagery from South Asian mass-media and popular culture, including graphic paintings from local Lahore cinema billboards and contemporary advertising from Bollywood and fashion magazines. The exhibition features a group of eleven paintings exploring the complex and often-uncomfortable relationships between servants and masters. Within these works, Toor transforms signs of poverty and commercial products into heroic symbols and absurdly idealized motifs through the metaphysical qualities of oil paint.

With Toor’s masterfully whimsical way with paint, these scenes are much more than the literal amalgamation of their commercial sources. Instead, they stage their own private masquerade, cloaking the fantasies of contemporary subjects with a veneer of museum-worthy Old Master virtuosity. The works, however, are not simply an exercise in technical skill, but rather the result of a complicated personal relationship with Western art history, by which the artist has re-interpreted his own place in his native social fabric. For Toor, aspiring towards the vivid scenes and technical perfection of the Renaissance and Baroque masters remains both a feasible and contemporary impulse, capable of yielding unique interpretations of the entrenched tenets of South Asian culture and advertising. In this lens, Toor’s work is set apart in an age of exhausted irony and innumerable iterations of commercial imagery.

In Girl with Driver, a salmon-colored Honda Civic becomes as luxurious as a silk cravat in an Ingres painting. The artist transforms this common sight in urban Pakistan – a woman in the backseat with a male driver up front – from its quotidian origins into an allegory of the humdrum of the present and the venerable painting of the past, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. However, Toor’s realism is selective, which can be seen in the fantastical luminosity of the colors and stylized anatomy of the figures, while visual clichés - the woman smelling a flower from the car side – provide a running commentary of the absurd social subtexts of such a scene. The composition and typecast figures in this and other works are culled from the ubiquitous advertisements for jewelry, beauty products (‘Fairness Creams’), new shopping malls and cell phone providers dominating Pakistan’s urban media landscape.

Both The Rickshaw Driver's Dream and Driver and Maid depict fantastic scenes of personal and collective wish-fulfilment through an impossible combination of visual references and cultural stereotypes, including the famous group dances of Bollywood musicals and the painted covers for Mills and Boon romance novels from the 1970s. The Rickshaw Driver borrows its compostion from Titian's Three Ages of Man (circa 16th century Venice), which itself was most likely influenced by Giorgioni’s themes and motifs of landscapes and nude figures. In Toor’s work, this familiar scene of idyllic romance is pushed over the edge into Bollywood pathos by the presence of ever-ready backup dancers, who have spontaneously broken into their routine in support of the “leading couple.” In this cinematic trope, the class differences that typically dominate South Asian society are instantaneously dissolved and cooks, gardeners, landlords and drivers all rejoice in choreographed triumph for a singular imaginary couple. As a result, it highlights the comedically absurd nature of mass-marketed culture and advertising in modern-day India and Pakistan that often serves to mask a much darker social reality.

Similarly, poverty oscillates between caricature and reverence in The Happy Servant, while The Happy Sweeper brushes away in a sentimental Disneyland of daisies and four-leaf clovers. In both works, one senses the inherent isolation of the central figure in an otherwise carelessly jubilant gathering or classically-inspired milieu. Further emphasizing this skewed reality in both works are the subjects’ frozen smiles, which exude a foreboding quality slithering under a skin of frivolity.

In all his works, Toor deftly presents a subtle melding of the consumeristic and social fantasies perpetuated by the mass-media of urban India and Pakistan, along with a Renaissace-era spirit of light, technique and idealis. This collaboration presents a unique vision of the complexities and exchanges between South Asian popular culture and the art historical traditions of Western idealization. Salman Toor (b. 1983) lives and works between New York and Karachi, Pakistan. This is his first solo exhibition in New York. ]]> Sat, 11 May 2013 14:51:14 EST Remaking the Modern - London Summer 2013 Exhibition http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-06-07_remaking-the-modern/ http://www.aicongallery.com/exhibitions/2013-06-07_remaking-the-modern/
Abir Karmakar
SCENT XII
2011
Oil on canvas
48 x 72 in.

June 7 - 10, 2013
Aicon Gallery

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