Food for thought from Eastern eyes
Terry Grimley reviews two major exhibitions of Indian art that have opened in the region.
While nowhere is immune from the worldwide recession, it seems that the Indian art market still remains buoyant.
A year ago, private collector Frank Cohen presented A Passage to India, a selection of recent Indian art from his collection at his gallery, Initial Access, near Wolverhampton. Now, he has returned to the subject with a second exhibition, A Passage to India, Part Two.
Meanwhile, the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry is hosting Through Other Eyes, a cross-section of art from South Asia taken from a different perspective. The Herbert, revitalised by its refurbished and beautifully extended building, is also beginning to collect in this area, having acquired a number of works from this exhibition for its collection.
At Initial Access, you can see artists who are already well established or have recently emerged within it. The superstar is Subhon Gupta, a painter, sculptor, installation and video-maker born in 1964 who has been called ‘the Damien Hirst of New Delhi’.
Gupta’s work has been exhibited from New York to the Venice Biennale and sells for six-figure sums. Like Hirst, one of his well-known works is a skull, not encrusted with diamonds but made from the stainless steel cooking utensils which are a subject for many of his paintings and feature in his installations.
One of his two works in this show is Curry, a display of utensils on a kitchen rack which appears at first sight to be monstrously over-sized but is, perhaps, a standard fitting from a restaurant.
Just as Indian musicians often seem to have a natural affinity for jazz, many Indian painters seem to be attuned to Pop Art.
It’s perhaps not surprising when you think of the tradition of giant hand-painted Bollywood posters or the kitsch in Indian religious imagery.
The large paintings of T V Santosh, Murali Cheeroth and Jitish Kallat all demonstrate this tendency, with Santosh’s Enemies’ Enemy II, a blown-up photograph in polarised 1960s-style colour of (I assumed) a terrorist suspect being arrested, while Cheeroth’s series of Scene paintings juxtapose random imagery (a construction worker, a man carrying a clutch of automatic rifles) set against blurry, gaudy colour. It’s hard to escape the feeling that paintings like these were being produced in British art schools 20 or 30 years ago.
At the Herbert Art Gallery, artist-curator Gerard Mermoz has scoured art colleges in India and Pakistan to find emerging talent before it has been filtered through the commercial system.
He has then displayed their work alongside that of tribal artists, including sculptures by unknown artists bought from antique shops.
Unusually for an exhibition in a public gallery, most of the works in Through Other Eyes are for sale, though most have been snapped up. Contrary to what might have been assumed until recently, prices here are significantly lower than in India.
Despite this, such is the hunger for new art among India’s emerging middle class that it is quite usual for the best students to sell out their degree shows.
The close relationship of a new art – buying bourgeoisie does not prevent the satire of Ved Gupta’s The Men: Life Un(der)covered, three brightly-painted glassfibre sculptures of plump businessmen whose faces are hidden by masks. These may remind British viewers of the sculptures Nicholas Munro was making in the late-1960s.
However, it is difficult not to be drawn to the work of tribal artists. Shri Jangarth Singh Shyam, for example, re-energised Gond painting through silkscreen printing. Tragically, his discovery led to his committing suicide in 2001.
Anil Chtaya’s The Dance, a spiral of white dancing figures on a dark background, records a village celebration in the style of hieroglyphics. Its’ mixed media include cow dung, a material also favoured by Subhon Gupta.
Other stunning works include Durgabai Vyam’s large pen-and-ink drawing The Bhopal Carbide Factory Disaster.
* Passage to India Part II will run at Initial Access until August 1, 2009. www.initalaccess.co.uk
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