Gurcharan Singh – A World Made Visible

Aakriti Art Gallery is proud to announce Gurcharan Singh – A World Made Visible, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by the acclaimed Indian artist Gurcharan Singh, curated by distinguished art critic and poet Prayag Shukla. The exhibition opens on 19 November 2025 and will be on view until 7 December at Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata.

Gurcharan Singh, born in 1949 in Patiala, is celebrated for his deeply humanistic figurative works that transform everyday life into visual poetry. Over five decades, he has developed a signature style that draws from Indian miniature painting, folk traditions, and modernist sensibilities, capturing the quiet theatre of the street, the courtyard, the veranda, and the marketplace. In his world, street performers, vendors, children, animals, gods, and lovers coexist in vibrant harmony—depicted with empathy, colour, and lyrical grace.

This exhibition presents a new body of work that continues Singh’s exploration of the ordinary as extraordinary. With bold forms, flattened perspectives, and symbolic detail, these paintings immerse the viewer in a world that is both familiar and timeless. As Singh himself reflects, “This is my world made visible from the invisible.”

Curator Prayag Shukla notes, “Gurcharan’s art does not impose spectacle—it invites reflection. His figures breathe, dream, and dwell in spaces that reflect not only social life, but emotional and philosophical depth. His recent works reaffirm his place among India’s most sincere and evocative painters.”

Singh’s works have been exhibited extensively in India and abroad, including the Tokyo Biennale, the Seoul Contemporary Art Show, and the Festival of India in the USSR. His paintings are part of major collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), the Museum of Non-Aligned Countries (Yugoslavia), and the Birla Academy of Art & Culture (Kolkata).

Exhibition Details:

Title: Gurcharan Singh – A World Made Visible

Dates: 19 November – 7 December 2025

Venue: Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata

Curator: Prayag Shukla

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Happening in Silence

Priyaranjaan Behera’s painterly execution is consistently nebulous supple, broad strokes are lushly handled with the relatively boundless area of his typically large compositions. The viewer of Happening in Silence can experience simultaneously the visceral grip of the magnetic gaze of the equestrienne on the left of the composition and the deconstructive awareness that horses conglomerate of cogently defined individual marks. Such handling allows the painting to maintain a certain level of ambiguity. When working in conjunction with the potent themes and motif, such ambiguity is able to provoke questions about power discourses that demand deliberation. However, the enigmatic quality can also be at the expense of vulnerability and authenticity. In the current series horses juxtaposed with one another on either side of the canvas, one with chiseled clarity and the other obscured in lyrical pentimenti, seem to symbolize a recurring oscillation between concrete affection and insouciant panache.

Priyaranjaan’s masterful handling of media, in his fifth solo show includes acrylic paintings on canvas and paper, which serves an expressive purpose beyond the tough luxuriance of his mark making. The diaphanous mottled quality describes the wild horses and constitutes a terrifying presence: beyond the functionality and decorativeness of the accessory itself, it transforms into a symbolic form in which masculinity is a veiled, mystical presence and the theatricality of seduction is complex and disguised. Inquiries into class are, like the gaze piercing through those veils, a haunting queasiness beneath the forceful hush. But such concealment is self-imposed, the veils voluntarily worn. In the drawings too, the artist offers another theater of masculinity. His sensuous horses deliver unfettered and unclouded erotic shockwaves they emanate the glare of intimate disclosure. His brush marks register bravura, they are generally more angular, staccato, and filled with rapid, nervous energy. Instead of serving as socio-cultural signifiers, according to the artist they are entryways into an individual’s personality and predicament, their symbolic associations woven into a backdrop to each character’s emotional state.

Priyaranjaan’s horses’ thrusts forcefully forward, rhyming with the curve of the assertively raised leg. The all-knowing intransigence of the complexion, anchored at the painfully scarlet reads more like a challenge than an invitation. Most works in this show follow a similar construction: singular, strong figures in pulsating spaces. In a way that, tellingly, recalls the veneer of theatricality in these paintings is simply shattered at first contact by the monstrous proportions of overt, inundating sensual energy. Such energy finds another, even more tactile outlet in Priyaranjaan’s drawings. These relatively small pieces skin-like drawings with their highly sexualized posture and melodic, flowing lines. The nuanced tonal washes congeal into corals and fire. The drawings seem to almost tremble under the intense private pleasure they are obliged to bear. The headstrong vulnerability embedded in all this sensationalized sexuality, evokes a sense of authentic emotional connection in the viewer.. There is, however, a curious side effect of this apparently apolitical stance. For in these paintings of luscious revelry and exquisite vulnerability, largely guided by the painter’s emotional instinct and searching sense of conviction, Priyaranjaan achieves a concreteness of viewer experience that is possibly stronger and more complete than a labyrinth constructed with intellectual tenets.

It is clear that Priyaranjaan has taken remarkably different routes in scripting a theatrical habitat for their subjects. A large part of this difference springs from a peculiar contemporary division between the provocative and the empathetic as painting attaches itself to an exterior cause. The enigmatic urgency in the works situates the viewer at a probing distance, in a spectatorial role, luxuriating in social glamour and drama when all of a sudden confronted by the characters’ haunting gaze and demand for a fair hearing. The visceral torrents of solitary emotion forcefully absorb the viewer who is then obliged to decide how to handle this gratuitous entry into an intensely animal world. In either event, theatricality is today more than ever implicated in paintings of horses as both the gazed upon and the spectators have become equally active players. The multiplicity and subtlety of treatments, of which we had a glimpse through these works shows, sparkles hopeful excitement for the continual evolution of painting’s capacity to give voice to a muted presentences to comply, to masquerade, to entice, or to attack.

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

2025

"Happening in Silence”

Solo show by

Artist
PRIYARANJAAN

Opening on Tuesday, 4th November, 5:30- 8 pm at NIPPON.
Date: 4th to 8th October 2025
Gallery Time: 3pm to 7pm

Address
Nippon
30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers
Nana Bhai Lane, Flora Fountain
Fort, Mumbai - 400 001

More details: 9820 510 599
RSVP: Email: nipponbombay@gmail.com

RSVP: Sunday & Monday Gallery will be closed