"Y Ū N B H Ī " So too.. Solo Show of Paintings By Renowned artist Amitabh Ashesh in Jehangir Art Gallery

Artist: Amitabh Ashesh

Amitabh Ashesh’s upcoming solo exhibition Yun Bhi, slated for June 10–16, 2025 at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery, marks the public unveiling of his unique artistic enterprise Yufism. This emergent painterly idiom resists strict categorisation, unfolding instead as a fluid, genre-defying language where abstraction, figuration, memory, and metaphor intermingle. Yufism pursues compositional departures while permitting multiple aesthetics. It promotes an intellectual sensibility undergirding gestures, impressions, and poetic residues.

Ashesh’s canvases invite the viewer into a liminal world, where the ordinary undergoes a quiet, contemplative metamorphosis. A drop of water is transformed into a temporal bead in the necklace of life. A window becomes more than a frame, it drifts, becoming an emblem of thought, cognition, and transience. In this manner, the mundane is reconfigured, made mythic, and held up for deeper reflection.

Recent work by Amitabh Ashesh

Paintings are rooted in Ashesh’s lived experiences, his domestic life, his garden, fleeting relationships, his sporting life, intercultural exchanges. Yet, these elements are not rendered as narrative or confession. Rather, they are translated into abstract poetics characterized by conceptual tenets. His titles, often lyrical and elusive, extend the canvas into the domain of language, encouraging dual engagement, visual and verbal, intuitive and interpretive.

What makes Yufism particularly compelling is its resistance to cultural containment. It seeks universality immune from geographies, movements, or a prescribed lineage. It opens space for plural meanings, for multiple truths to exist simultaneously. In Ashesh’s hands, painting becomes both inquiry and evocation, rooted and transcendent. Through Yufism, he constructs a painterly world that invites viewers to see not just images, but the ineffable ideas behind them, an art of feeling, form, and fugitive thought.

 Press Release

10 - 16 June 2025

"Y Ū N    B H Ī "

So too..

Solo Show of Paintings 

By 

Renowned  artist Amitabh Ashesh

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery 

161-B, M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda, 

Mumbai 400001

11am to 7pm

https://istarah.art

+91 98459 56328

ISEE TARAH

Artist: Amitabh Ashesh

This show is curated by Carmela Brunetti.

        Amitabh Ashesh is an alumnus of Stanford University’s Art Dept. USA. He has been trained at Stanford University USA during 1988-1994 with Bay Area Figurative movement under Frank Lobdell and other stalwarts. He has been a creative Director at JWT and Saatchi. He is also an alumnus of IIT Bombay. He has made about 120 paintings since 2014 and about 40-45 works from that series will be displayed in this exhibition.

        The present series showcases the original creative work of Amitabh Ashesh on ‘Yufism’ in oil on canvas and the pastel and charcoal on art paper. It provides a new class of imagery on the ‘Yufism’ compositional platform where scenic figurative and invisible elements share their attributes, the windows becomes blocks of light, the rain drops, trail of ornamental beads and ripping sea waves are worn as a skirt etc.  Each painting is accompanied by a titular poem, elaborating its meaning and thereby arousing viewers with its parallel literary association.

        He has used conceptual innovations of Yufism such as scenic elements in human figuration, anthropomorphic and recursive scenery, exploded objects and blended forms for artistic effect. A collective recollection of various scenery in quotidian Indian, life find a prominent place in his work such as Bangalore’s famed Brigade Road, home cooking specialities, street dogs feed by kind strangers etc.  His work is innovative and eloquent and shares an instant dialogue with the viewers due to its clarity and lucidity.

  Renowned artist Amitabh Ashesh will showcase his recent work in oil on canvas and pastel and charcoal on art paper in a solo art exhibition at Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery, Bajaj Bhavan, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021 from 27 to 31 Oct. 2024.  It will be open there for free public viewing daily between 11 am to 7 pm. 

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