Forgotten Fold marks a critical intervention in the historiography of Bengal’s academic realist tradition, offering a singular focus on Ananda Mohan Shaha—an artist largely omitted from mainstream narratives, yet pivotal to understanding the visual culture of early 20th-century Bengal. This richly documented volume revisits a neglected chapter in Indian art history by reconstructing the life, work, and context of Shaha through rare archival images, journal facsimiles, and freshly restored reproductions of his only known masterpiece, Ashru-Kumva (1918).
Structured around one work by one artist, Forgotten Fold nonetheless extends its critical scope by situating Shaha alongside his better-known contemporaries—such as Hemendranath Mazumdar, Atul Bose, and B.C. Law—thereby inviting a broader reassessment of Bengal’s academic realist lineage. The book is both a monograph and a collective curatorial gesture, drawing on newly surfaced evidence, institutional exhibition records, and contemporary commentary from early 20th-century art publications.
With over one hundred images—many previously unpublished—this volume not only documents visual material but also provides rich scholarly interpretation. Essays by Uma Nair, Soujit Das, Mrinal Ghosh, Dr. Anuradha Ghosh, Debdutta Gupta, and Vikram Bachhawat offer layered perspectives: from critical theory and archival restoration to personal curatorial reflections and historiographic insights. The inclusion of primary sources—such as the 1920 Puja issue of The Indian Academy of Art, which first described Ashru-Kumva—further anchors the volume in the period’s own aesthetic discourse.
Through this rigorous reassembly of visual and textual fragments, Forgotten Fold succeeds in doing what its title promises: recovering a “fold” of Bengal’s visual culture that had slipped through the seams of institutional memory. It sets a benchmark for future archival and revisionist studies in South Asian art, underscoring the necessity of monographic research in unearthing complex, often marginalised, artistic legacies.
A limited edition of 500 copies, this publication will be of particular value to scholars of colonial art history, curators, archivists, and collectors invested in the re-mapping of India’s visual modernity.
Aakriti Art Gallery (AAG)
Art gallery in Kolkata, West Bengal
Address: Orbit Enclave, 12/3a, Picasso Bithi, Mullick Bazar, Park Street area, Kolkata, West Bengal 700017
Between Form and Silence - Solo Exhibition by Asha Shetty
Between Form and Silence is a solo exhibition by Mumbai-based contemporary artist Asha Shetty, presented at Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda. The exhibition brings together recent works in acrylic and ink on canvas that move between abstraction and figuration, exploring states of balance, transition, and inward contemplation.
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| Artist: Asha Shetty |
Shetty’s practice is grounded in rigorous training in drawing and painting, supported by formal study of Indian aesthetics. Her works do not follow narrative structures; instead, they invite slow looking and quiet engagement. Figures appear as inward-facing presences rather than portraits, existing as states of being. These are placed in dialogue with abstract structures, subtle geometric rhythms, and elements drawn from nature and ritual
Material process plays a central role in the artworks. Working with acrylic, ink, collage, and layered textures, Shetty builds surfaces gradually through addition, erosion, and restraint. Marks remain visible, carrying traces of time and decision, while the balance between what is revealed and what is concealed is carefully maintained.
Colour, symmetry, and surface rhythm guide the viewer’s experience, creating compositions that hold stillness without becoming static. The artworks resist immediate interpretation, allowing meaning to unfold through sustained viewing.
The past year marks a new phase in Shetty’s artistic journey, where traditional sensibilities intersect with contemporary abstraction. ‘Between Form and Silence’ offers a reflective space within the gallery, inviting viewers to pause, observe, and engage with a visual language shaped by quiet intensity and considered restraint.
This show will be inaugurated on 30th December 2025 by Honourable Guests – Mr. Surendra Jagtap, (Eminent Artist & Principal of J.K. Academy of Art & Design Mumbai), Mr. Prakash Bhise(Eminent Artist), Mr. Ganesh Hire(Renowned Artist), Virendra Chopde(Well-known artist).
The exhibition is open daily from 11 am to 7 pm for public viewing.
From: 29th December 2025 to 4th January 2026
“Between Form and Silence”
Where the unseen begins to speak- Recent works By
Contemporary artist Asha Shetty
VENUE: Jehangir Art Gallery,161-B, M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001, Timing: 11am to 7pmContact: +91 9326475228
M. V. Dhurandhar was a renowned Indian artist and an esteemed teacher at the Sir J. J. School of Art. A master of both oil and watercolour techniques, he was honoured with the title ‘Rao Bahadur’ by the British Government.
Following the passing of Raja Ravi Varma, Dhurandhar emerged as a leading figure who popularised figurative compositions blending human drama, Indian aesthetics, and Western academic methods.
This newly published book presents a significant survey of Dhurandhar’s artistic journey by featuring his major and newly identified works from different phases of his life. It reveals his evolving artistic personality and sensibilities, and also reflects the literary depth seen in his Marathi writings. His paintings vividly document the fashion, customs, and socio-cultural nuances of the colonial period and the Indian Princely States. A gold medalist of Western India and a beloved artist of the island city of Bombay, Dhurandhar shaped the visual culture of his time through his illustrations, postcards, posters, chromolithographs, and periodical artworks.
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:
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
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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: 23rd to 29th 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
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.
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| 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
