Summer Tips 25, an exhibition of works by 11 Artist. curated by Abhijeet Gondkar.

 

The predominantly artist audience, gallery members and collectors intermingled with the artworks. Tathi Premchand is well known for the prolific social and cultural research that informs his art, most notably for his works which explores the destruction of green spaces.  The exhibition begins indoors, under the eaves of the gallery where visitors can view pdf montage, simultaneously broadcast stories told by the exhibition’s nine interviewees. Snippets of individual histories intermingle with one another and then, windswept, fade into the very landscape of Viraj Naik’s etchings. In Vasudev Shetye’s Yin Yang two female figures stand  apart from each other looking at the viewer. The viewer’s gaze travels first to the left, where a traditional Goan woman stands in a pretty red dress, a hand fan, wearing a small crucifix pendant on a chain. The figure that stands next to her is masked, unsightly with sharp teeth, wearing an armature that is soiled and dirty from use. The figure on the left is a well groomed person who embodies etiquette and sophistication while the figure on the right is a rebel.

The narrative, never didactic, evolves as you focus on a particular work. Past merges with the present through Nilesh Shilkar’s deft handling of expressionist color and sculptural forms. He is an abstract artist whose merge of form and content is a tour de force.  Ratnadeep Adivrekar’s Cross-stitch (F12 = -F21) Opposites are two perspectives of the same situation. Warhol’s Batman Dracula pits the Caped Crusader against the vampiric Transylvanian count of legend, the millionaire vigilante who seems to fear nothing but bats against the immortal. If Prashant Salvi can recall the animal in a person, he can also bring out the “humanity” of animals. In addition to his own, touching nature study, in an uncharacteristic fluency. It is rare to see a modern painter of animals unconcerned with their symbolism and marveling instead in their sheer physical presence. Questioned about the erotic potential of his subject matter, he responds that “the paintings that really excite me have an erotic element irrespective of subject matter.” As with earlier work, we are flying, floating, or dreaming through hyperconsciousness or maybe all of these at once. References to explosions, ecstasy, are well established elements of Kapil Alaskar’s vocabulary, as is his ability to deliver this iconography with masterful, exquisite clarity. The surface of the painting is a statement in itself– his signature The process of creation holds as much value as the result.

Transcending the early influence of European Abstract Expressionism, KT Shivaprasad explores the relationships between reality and illusion Shivaprasad painted a series of female nudes and later, portraits of villagers in natural environs, which soon became more abstract than figurative .inspired by   the great British modernist Lucien Freud his work has won national and international acclaim. Even in the most unexpected encounters with the beautiful, however, there coexists some component of déjà vu or strange familiarity. To call that experience universal or transcendent performs a ritual act of devotion. It protects the preciousness of one’s beauty experience in a shell of coherence. I think there are strong arguments for beauty’s historical and cultural breadth based in our neural and biologically evolved relation to the world, but arguments for artistic practices built on that foundation often flatten the peculiar and specific details that give artworks their life. The universalizing description also overlooks the work’s character as a rhetorical object, subject to unanticipated uses within the culture. It draws people toward clichés and reductive stereotypes that are then rationalized as truths and archetypes. The exhibition concludes on 26th May you can view the works on Nippon Gallery’s website thereafter.

Nippon Gallery
30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers, Nanabhai Lane,
Flora Fountain Fort, Mumbai -400001 Maharashtra – India – Plant Earth
Tuesday – Saturday,
3.00 pm – 7.00 pm