Aakriti Art Gallery to Launch Two Landmark Books Marking 20 Years of Art Excellence

 Friday, 26th December 2025 | 5:00 PM onwards | Kolkata

Kolkata, India — Aakriti Art Gallery proudly announces the launch of two significant art publications—“Shaping Bengal: Modern Sculpture in Bengal (1850s–2025)” by noted art historian Mrinal Ghosh, and the research-led volume “Forgotten Fold: On Rediscovering Ananda Mohan Shaha”—as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations. The launch event will be held on Friday, 26th December 2025, from 5:00 PM onwards at Aakriti Art Gallery, 12/3A Hungerford Street, Kolkata.

The evening will be graced by the presence of Samik Bandopadhyay, distinguished scholar, critic, editor, and author known for his seminal contributions to art, film, and theatre.

About the Books:

Shaping Bengal: Modern Sculpture in Bengal (1850s–2025)

Authored by Mrinal Ghosh, this monumental work is the first comprehensive survey of Bengal’s sculptural journey across more than one and a half centuries. The volume maps the evolution of modern and modernist sculpture in Bengal—from colonial academic realism to post-Independence experimentation and contemporary practices—featuring over 150 sculptors with critical commentary, archival photographs, and curatorial insight.

Forgotten Fold: On Rediscovering Ananda Mohan Shaha

This pathbreaking publication restores attention to Ananda Mohan Shaha, an overlooked academic realist painter of early 20th-century Bengal. With contributions by Uma Nair, Soujit Das, Mrinal Ghosh, Dr. Anuradha Ghosh, Debdutta Gupta, and Vikram Bachhawat, Forgotten Fold brings together archival research, facsimile material, and new interpretations that reposition Shaha within the larger narrative of Indian art history.

Event Schedule:

• 5:00 – 6:00 PM | Launch of Shaping Bengal
• 6:00 – 6:15 PM | Tea Break
• 6:15 – 7:15 PM | Launch of Forgotten Fold

The books will be available at the gallery and will also be distributed as part of a special New Year gift to collectors, artists, scholars, and patrons who have supported Aakriti’s journey over the past two decades.

“This twin launch marks not just our 20-year milestone, but also our continued commitment to rigorous research, rediscovery, and celebration of India’s visual heritage,”

— Vikram Bachhawat, Founder–Director, Aakriti Art Gallery

For media enquiries or RSVP:

 9830411115

 admin@aakritiartgallery.com

 www.aakritiartgallery.com

“Chittadarshani” An Art Exhibition by Dhiraj Hadole, Pravin Waghmare, Swapnil Sangole

 

Pravin Waghmare

Pravin Waghmare’s art practice emerges from an acute attentiveness to the visual and emotional residues of everyday life. Forms, colours, textures, and fleeting sensations are not treated as passive observations but as active forces that impress themselves upon the artist’s inner self. From this silent accumulation of experience, Waghmare constructs a language of abstraction that is grounded firmly in lived reality.

Artist: Pravin Waghmare, Acrylic on canvas

Although his works appear abstract, they are anchored in the rhythms of the visible world, its pauses, frictions, and reverberations. His surfaces carry a sense of return and response: every encounter, whether with nature, society, or the ordinary mechanics of daily existence, rebounds into the pictorial field. This cyclical exchange lends his compositions a quiet intensity, where colour blocks, fractured planes, and layered textures behave like echoes of perception rather than representations of objects.

 

Waghmare’s use of colour is deliberate and experiential, functioning as a carrier of emotion. Lines and forms unfold through an intuitive yet disciplined process, reflecting an honest negotiation between control and spontaneity. His paintings offer a sustained meditation on how experience transforms into visual thought. Pravin Waghmare articulates abstraction as a deeply human, perceptual act, one that translates the unsaid into form with clarity and depth.

 

Dhiraj Hadole:

 

Dhiraj Hadole’s work enters the lineage of geometric abstraction not through utopian rigidity or formal bravado, but through a quieter recalibration of what geometry can contain. Hadole belongs to a reflective generation that allows structure to coexist with memory, affect, and care.

 

His compositions echo the discipline of hard-edge abstraction, yet resist its doctrinaire coolness. The planes feel inhabited rather than imposed; edges meet without aggression, and colour operates as mood. Geometry here is closer to a psychological modulation than an optical one. Reduction does not erase feeling, it distils it. Repetition becomes attention, not control.

Artist: Dhiraj Hadole

Materially, Hadole’s practice departs from modernist purity. The stitched, layered surfaces introduce a tactile memory aligned with domestic knowledge and inherited labour. Quilt-like constructions suggest an indigenous abstraction shaped by patience, repair, and assembly, without slipping into literal craft reference. Cultural specificity is absorbed ethically, not illustrated.

 

These works propose equilibrium: that intimacy can be measured. In this restraint lies their quiet radicalism. Dhiraj Hadole proves that stability is not the enemy of depth, that precision can remain soft. These are paintings that behave like shelters, steady, composed, and rewarding to those willing to slow down and meet them on their own terms.

Swapnil Sangole

Swapnil Vilasrao Sangole’s sculptures are rooted in a rigorous engagement with material, memory, and metaphysical inquiry. Working primarily with stone, he positions sculpture as a site where permanence and impermanence coexist, where time is both resisted and inscribed. Drawing deeply from Indian temple architecture, Sangole distils their structural intelligence, symbolism and spiritual gravity into a contemporary language.

 

His works reveal a careful balance between solidity and openness. Carved voids, layered planes, and architectural motifs evoke sacred spaces while remaining resolutely abstract. Each chisel mark becomes a temporal gesture, an assertion of continuity that acknowledges rupture. The stone is listened to, negotiated with, and allowed to assert its own agency within the final form.

Sculptures by Swapnil Vilasrao Sangole’s

 

Sangole’s sculptures function as thresholds between the material and the metaphysical, inviting tactile contemplation. They are not objects of passive viewing but embodied experiences that ask the viewer to slow down and reckon with scale, weight, and silence. In expanding his practice toward collaborative and community-based projects, Sangole further opens it up to collective memory and shared authorship. Ultimately, his work honours the sacred while confronting contemporary realities. Through restraint, precision, and conceptual clarity, Swapnil Sangole affirms sculpture’s enduring capacity to witness, question, and heal.

 From: 23^rd to 29^th December 2025

“Chittadarshani”

An Art Exhibition by Dhiraj Hadole, Pravin Waghmare, Swapnil Sangole

VENUE: Jehangir Art Gallery, Auditorium Hall

161-B, M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001,Timing: 11am to 7pm

“Chittadarshanee” Art Exhibition by contemporary artist Dhiraj Hadole in Jehangir Art Gallery

 Holding Space: Dhiraj Hadole’s Geometry

Dhiraj Hadole’s work enters the long history of geometric abstraction not through utopian rigidity or formal bravado, but through a quieter, inward recalibration of what geometry can hold within. Where early modernist abstraction like Constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism, often positioned geometry as a universal language detached from subjectivity, Hadole belongs to a later, more reflective strain of abstractionists that allow structure to coexist with memory, affect, continuity, and care.

Artist: Dhiraj Hadole 

His compositions recall the disciplined clarity of hard-edge abstraction, yet they resist its doctrinaire coolness. Unlike the mathematically assertive geometries of artists such as early Bauhaus painters, Hadole’s planes feel lived-in. They are not declarations; they are settlements. The edges meet without aggression, and colour behaves less like a system and more like a mood. This places his work closer to artists who softened geometry through experience, where colour interaction became psychological rather than purely optical, like Josef Albers.

At the same time, Hadole’s surfaces carry an unmistakable emotional register that aligns him with a lineage of felt abstraction, artists who used reduction not to erase feeling, but to distil it. One senses an affinity with quiet grids, where repetition functions as a form of attention rather than control. Hadole treats geometry as a meditative framework, a way to steady the mind rather than dominate it. It is evident in the way he constructs the wood stretcher, and drapes the canvas over it deftly, almost like one was reenacting a childhood memory, shaping it to precision.

The stitched and layered qualities in his work also introduce a material memory absent from classical geometric abstraction. Here, the work quietly diverges from Western modernist purity and moves toward a more indigenous abstraction; one shaped by domestic knowledge, textile logic, and inherited labour. Hadole’s quilt-inspired works situate him within a broader global shift where abstraction absorbs cultural specificity without becoming illustrative of the milieu. The geometry does not reference craft directly, yet it carries its ethics: patience, repair, assembly, warmth.

Emotionally, these works do not aim for expressionism. There is no outburst, no rupture. Instead, they emerge as a feeling that can exist in equilibrium, that care can be structured, that intimacy can be measured without being diminished. This places Hadole in dialogue with post-minimalist sensibilities, where restraint becomes a moral position rather than an aesthetic trick.

What makes Hadole's paintings quietly radical is their ethics. They insist that stability is not the enemy of life. They argue, without preaching, that a composed surface can still carry intimacy, that precision can still be soft. Dhiraj Hadole’s geometry is not about control for its own sake; it is about building a space where inner turbulence can settle without being forgotten. In that sense, his work aligns with the exhibition’s spirit of Chitta–Chitra: the mind and heart translated into image, not through confession, but through construction.

These are paintings that behave like shelters. They do not shout to be understood. They stay, they steady, and they reward the viewer who is willing to slow down and meet them at their pace.

Sushma Sabnis

Mumbai

December 2025

From: 23rd to 29th December 2025

"CHITTADARSHANI"

Art Exhibition by contemporary artist Dhiraj  Hadole

VENUE: Jehangir Art Gallery, Auditorium Hall,161-B, M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001, Timing: 11am to 7pm

Oscar-Qualified Marathi Short Film Dear Panther Selected at London Lift-Off Global Network

The Oscar-qualified Marathi short film Dear Panther has been officially selected at the prestigious Lift-Off Global Network – London Lift-Off Film Festival 2025, marking a significant international milestone for Indian independent cinema. The festival is regarded as an important global platform for emerging filmmakers, offering international exposure and industry networking opportunities.

The Lift-Off Global Network hosts a series of film festivals during the Lift-Off Season, featuring curated screenings, showcases at Pinewood Studios, workshops, and structured networking programs. Selected filmmakers are invited to join the Lift-Off Network Members Hub, enabling participation in global focus groups, professional workshops, and collaborations through both online and in-person sessions.

Set against the backdrop of a rapidly advancing yet deeply unequal India, Dear Panther presents a powerful social narrative. While the nation celebrates historic achievements such as the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3, a significant segment of its educated population continues to struggle for basic rights. The film captures this contradiction with sensitivity and realism, earning its status as an Oscar Qualified Short Film.

The story revolves around a PhD scholar fighting a prolonged legal and bureaucratic battle with the local Municipal Corporation to claim his rightful home. His personal struggle evolves into a broader resistance against systemic injustice, administrative neglect, and widening socio-economic inequality. As the divide between the privileged and the marginalized deepens, Panther emerges as a voice for the oppressed. The film compellingly questions whether he can lead his community out of systemic deprivation—or be consumed by it.

The film’s impact is strengthened by its strong creative execution. Director Dhananjay Nirmalaxman Sable delivers a compelling vision, supported by Shonali Dhakane’s precise editing, Ajay Sagar’s realistic cinematography, and evocative background music composed by Pratik Borase, which draws audiences deeper into the emotional landscape of the narrative.

A unique aspect of Dear Panther is its authentic portrayal of real-life residents from Mumbai’s Dadar chawls, many of whom continue to live without basic civic amenities or housing rights. Their lived experiences lend the film a powerful documentary-like realism. Sable also plays the lead role of Panther, delivering a restrained yet impactful performance that captures inner conflict, resistance, and moral urgency. The supporting cast—including Deepali Badekar, Ashlesha Gade, Shonali Dhakane, Pragya Garibe, Atish Akhade, Harish Kadam, Kishor Bachhav, child actor Aaradhya Jadhav, and 73-year-old Vanitabai Kharat in her debut performance—adds emotional depth and credibility. Officials’ roles portrayed by Ankush Chourpagar, Amar Lahane, Nitin Shinde, and Ravi Kale further strengthen the narrative.

Dear Panther has received recognition at several prestigious film festivals worldwide, including:

12th Goa International Short Film Festival, Panaji 2025 – Best Indian Writer (Screenplay)

Jaipur International Film Festival 2026 – Official Selection

Vaanam Art Festival – P.K. Rosy Short Film Festival, Chennai

Kobani International Film Festival, Germany

Egyptian-American International Film Festival, New York

Ajanta-Ellora International Film Festival, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra

The film’s post-screening Q&A sessions have sparked meaningful discussions, underscoring its strong social relevance and cinematic impact. With Dear Panther, writer-director Dhananjay Nirmalaxman Sable establishes a distinct voice on the global stage, while co-producer Nitin Shinde, in his debut as producer, successfully shoulders a significant creative responsibility.

The production received substantial local support from Amar Lahane Mitra Mandal, Chunabhatti, and Bouddhajan Panchayat Committee No. 127, Dadar, whose cooperation was instrumental during filming.

The international recognition of Dear Panther is not merely a milestone for a single film but represents a meaningful step forward for socially conscious Indian and Marathi cinema.

🔗 Vote for Dear Panther at the London Lift-Off Film Festival 2025:

Tickets are now available for purchase by the public via website:

Dear Panther Voting and Preview Tickets are now available for purchase by the public via website:

Liftoff.network/london-lift-off-film-festival-2025/

"Manthan" Art Exhibition by Anisha Sanghani in Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery

From December 1–6, 2025, U.S.-based artist Anisha Sanghani brings her inspiring exhibition “Manthan—Let the Churn Begin Within You” to Mumbai. With oceans occupying 71% of our planet, Sanghani uses the Samudra Manthan myth to reimagine Earth’s vast waters as sites of both crisis and transformation.

Artist: Anisha Sanghani

This edition of “Manthan” focuses on plastic suffocation, portraying turtles navigating choking debris, fish trapped in drifting nets, and mythological figures gasping under symbolic coils of waste. Yet Sanghani’s luminous palettes offer a sense of hope—suggesting that awareness can spark change.

 

Her mixed-media artistry weaves textures with radiant strokes, showing that beauty can exist even in struggle. Sanghani’s own immersion experiment—submerging with plastic on her face—deepened her resolve to speak for silent marine beings. “Their lungs became my lesson,” she reflects.

Ocean Illusion Collection (1 of 8 Paintings )

12x12 inches

Mixed-Media on Canvas

 

“Manthan” stands as an invitation: to awaken, introspect, and begin the conscious inner churning needed to protect the waters we rely on.

 

This show will be inaugurated on 1^st December 2025 at 5pm by Distinguished Guests:

Ms. Nidhi Choudhari, IAS, Director, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mr. Sameer Balvally and Shilpa Jain Balvally, founders of the award-winning architecture and interior design practice Studio Osmosis, Mr. Ronak Sutaria, CEO, Respirer Living Sciences, Mr. Rishiraj Sethi, Director, Aura Art Development Pvt Ltd and co-founder of Aura Art, Dilip Ranade, Distinguished Indian artist and former Senior Curator at Mumbai’s CSMVS, Prakash Bal Joshi, Renowned Artist and Author.

 Manthan: Let the Churn Begin Within You” — An Environmental Awakening

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery, Nariman Point, Mumbai | Dec 1–6, 2025

“The Pulse of Harmony” Solo Show of Paintings By well-known artist Dadasaheb Yadav in Jehangir Art Gallery

In this new body of work, Dadasaheb Yadav steps away from the representational terrains that once anchored his explorations of monsoon, earth, and the fragrant immediacy of Earth. Instead, he enters the atmospheric unknown; an arena where gesture becomes geography, colour becomes emotion, and abstraction becomes a language of its own unrestrained logic. These water colour and mixed-media surfaces carry forward his lifelong fidelity to nature, but they no longer describe it; they distill it.

 Arist: Dadasaheb Yadav 

The works surge with washes of violet, viridian, cobalt, cadmium gold, and sudden explosions of black; strokes that feel like weather rather than depiction. Yadav has always been an artist tuned into elemental rhythms. Here, those rhythms unspool into pure energy. The paintings breathe in gradients, drips, and splashes, suggesting the moment before a storm breaks, the hush between waves, the twilight blur of sky dissolving into land. But this time, the harmony he invokes is not pastoral; it is kinetic, restless, charged with the honesty of lived experience. These abstractions demonstrate an artist unafraid to cut away the literal. What remains is an emotional architecture: atmospheres rather than landscapes, sensations rather than scenes. The viewer is invited into a space where colour becomes memory, movement becomes intuition, and the boundary between internal and external worlds collapses. This is harmony understood not as quietude, but as equilibrium born out of flux, nature’s true state.

Yadav’s mature confidence is evident in his handling of fluid media: bleeding edges that resist containment, fields of pigment that collide yet hold their ground. His gestures feel both spontaneous and inevitable, as if the work knows how to form itself. The paintings echo the lineage of abstract expressionism yet remain unmistakably rooted in his own sensibility, devotional to nature but no longer beholden to its forms.

In these works, Dadasaheb Yadav offers viewers not a window to the world but a mirror to their own internal weather. The visual intensity, the chromatic rush, the raw immediacy, all converge into a profound reminder that harmony is not found; it is felt, encountered, and made anew each time the colours meet.

Sushma Sabnis -Mumbai

November 2025 - 

From: 24th to 30th November 2025 -“The Pulse of Harmony”

Solo Show of Paintings By well-known artist Dadasaheb Yadav

Jehangir Art Gallery,161-B, M.G. Road,Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001Timing -11am to 7pm.

Aakriti Art Gallery Kicks Off 20th Anniversary Celebrations with Gurucharan Singh Exhibition

Kolkata, 20 November 2025 — Aakriti Art Gallery, one of Kolkata’s leading contemporary art spaces, launched its landmark 20th anniversary celebrations with the inauguration of A World Made Visible, a solo exhibition of recent works by renowned artist Gurucharan Singh, on Wednesday evening.

 Prayag Shukla and Gurucharan Singh

Curated by noted poet and art critic Prayag Shukla, the exhibition opened to a packed house of art lovers, collectors, artists, and literary figures. The event, held at the gallery’s premises at 12/3A Hungerford Street, turned into a vibrant gathering of Kolkata’s cultural community.

The highlight of the evening was a rare live drawing session by the artist himself. In a deeply engaging gesture, Gurucharan Singh unveiled the show not with a speech, but through the spontaneous act of creation—sketching directly onto canvas in front of the assembled audience. The drawing, composed in bold strokes of charcoal, depicted a layered composition of architectural and human forms, emblematic of the themes explored in the exhibition.

“To witness Gurucharan Singh draw live was to watch decades of artistic thought unfold in real time,” said one of the attendees. “It felt deeply personal, like an offering to the viewers.”

The exhibition features Singh’s recent body of work—complex, vibrant, and rooted in a narrative style that blends myth, memory, and lived experience. His visual language, marked by angular figures, architectural motifs, and a subtle interplay of light and gesture, continues to evolve while maintaining its contemplative depth.

In his curatorial note, Prayag Shukla described the exhibition as “an act of revelation—where the artist allows us to see the visible and the imagined in the same breath.”

The inauguration marks the beginning of a year-long celebration by Aakriti Art Gallery, which has played a pioneering role in promoting modern and contemporary Indian art since its founding in 2005.

“This is not just an exhibition—it is the first of many events that will celebrate our two-decade journey with artists and collectors,” said Vikram Bachhawat, Director of Aakriti Art Gallery. “We are honoured to begin the celebrations with a master like Gurucharan Singh.”

The exhibition A World Made Visible will remain open for public viewing in the coming weeks. Entry is free and all are welcome.

Aakriti Art Gallery (AAG)

Address: Orbit Enclave, 12/3a, Picasso Bithi, Mullick Bazar, Park Street area, Kolkata, West Bengal 700017

Phone: 033 2289 3027

A SOLO SHOW BY ABHISHEK SALVE - NIPPON SOLO MUMBAI

 Coming soon

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