New Delhi, Sep 6 (PTI) Works by some of the most influential names in Indian modernism, including Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil, MF Husain, FN Souza and Ram Kumar, come together in a new exhibition exploring how artists imagined and responded to a society undergoing profound social and cultural change.
“Many Modernisms: Figuring the New Artistic India”, currently underway at Thapar Gallery, brings together diverse artistic practices spanning generations and geographies, with works by KK Hebbar, Bhupen Khakhar, Sadanand Bakre, A Ramachandran, Badri Narayan, Satish Gujral, Sohan Qadri, B Prabha, Haku Shah and Himmat Shah, among others.
It presents Indian modernism not as a single style or movement, but as a diverse and evolving field shaped by different histories, experiences and ways of seeing.
Moving between village and metropolis, tradition and international modernism, the exhibition examines the many ways artists responded to and imagined a changing India.
“Modern Indian art did not emerge as a single style, at a single point in time, or from any one particular location. At its heart was a response to a changing society and to the ways in which that change could be seen, experienced, remembered and imagined,” Ashish Thapar, director of Thapar Gallery, said in a statement.
The exhibition, he said, brings together a diverse range of practices that transformed the visual language of 20th-century India and considers Indian modernism as an evolving and plural field, shaped by visual memory, formal experimentation and individual artistic visions.
Across the show, artists engage with landscape, mythology, faith, the human body, labour and everyday life, revealing distinct personal and social realities. The works move from “figuration and its engagement with social realities and emotional intensity to abstraction’s explorations of meditation, cosmology and colour”.
The materiality of surface, line and sculptural form further opens up ideas of memory, displacement and interior worlds.
“Together, these practices reflect the breadth of artistic responses that shaped modern Indian art across generations and geographies,” said the organisers.
So, instead of offering a single definition of Indian modernism, “Many Modernisms” aims to bring together different artistic languages, subjects and approaches to present a broader picture of the ways artists imagined and represented a changing India.
The exhibition will come to a close on October 15. PTI MG MG MG
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