Somu Desai

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Somu Desai 
Untitled
Oil & Acrylic On Canvas
72"x60"
2011

Somu Desai graduated in fine art from College of Art at Amalsad. Working from Mumbai for a decade first as a fashion designer, muralist and an architectural assistant he did several commissioned public sculptures. The experimentation in different media helped refine his skills before he returned to his native land and set up his own studio at Valsad and continued working on projects in various parts of the State. Along with a group of artists he worked on a huge mural converting a factory in Baroda into his canvas and titled it Vibrant Gujarat. His other projects include Still in Baroda and Thrill in Baroda, attempts to define the city as an abode for artists and as a cultural hub. His compositions are large and involve different stages of masking and revealing giving an extra depth and dimension to the work. Involving different groups of people from within the surrounding area as well as young artists, his art focuses on people at work, carrier wagons, children and others. Portrayal of vehicles in myriad ways such as an overloaded lorry or airplanes as flying machines the artist works in different media including digital work and video art.
courtesy: art positive

Chintan Upadhyay

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
Chintan Upadhyay
Sorry does not matter any more, 2006
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas 
60 x 60 in / 152 x 152 cm

"My philosophy is created work by work. I don't decide beforehand what I will do; I have to go through the process of painting." When painting, he "starts with color. Many layers and forms come and go until I get something, and develop it. I end with the surface that I intended."
courtesy:Saffronart

Veena Bhargava

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Veena Bhargava 
Title: Performer Series VIII
Medium: Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas
Size: 68" x 56"

Working primarily with oils and acrylics, Bhargava, nevertheless, has experimented with many mediums. Her work with encaustic was one of her first experiments with textures. In the '80s, Bhargava created two assemblages with junk wood and scrap iron found from building demolitions. One of these assemblages was the result of a workshop with Piloo Pockhanawalla. In 1983, Bhargava did a course in photography at Chitrabani, Calcutta. The photographic image has always fascinated Bhargava and, of late, she has been juxtaposing silk screen images with her paintings.

Bhargava's work has been predominantly figurative although, in the early years, she had done some semi-abstract lithoid forms. The decaying city has always figured prominently in her works. Architectural elements and other symbols or urban anomie like a crowded bus, an open manhole, graffiti and posters, surface in her works again and again. The other important feature of her figuration is the iconography of a woman. Sometimes she is Kali, at other times she is a bound, distorted body or a street performer juggling with the roles in her life. Of late, Bhargava has been experimenting with the surface of the painting adding three-dimensional objects or silk-screen images. She is also introducing elements of myth and fantasy to her strongly expressionistic style of painting.
courtesy: contemporary indian art

Yusuf Arrakal

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Yusuf Arrakal 
Untitled 
Oil On Canvas 
2005 
Arakkal's paintings are singularly expressionistic in style. In them one could trace the artist's "deep concern for man and society. Set against a dark, oppressive background are the faceless figures of ordinary people expressing brooding loneliness and despair brought on by a society obsessively drawn towards material success where ordinary people have no place".He has done many works in different media, canvases, sculptures with emphasis on tiger conservation..
There are many books and articles published on the creative world of Yusuf Arakkal in different languages.
courtesy:wiki

Vijay Bagodi

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Vijay Bagodi 
Remembering Bhupen 
Etching: 4/24 
Color: Black, 20/16 in
Graphics: Limited edition Print

Artist note:"If u drop a pebble in a pond, it creates concentric circles, one after the other, which slowly diffuse into numerous ripples at the edge...as illusions of what has taken place." His works are like ripples...born out of lived experiences. Distinct references to the personal or the universal fuse into ambiguity. "My expressions are in the form of remembered tales, legends and myths. Emotions resurface in my works carrying past into the present and present into the future."
courtesy: saffronart

Laxman Aelay

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Laxman Aelay 
Acrylic On Canvas 
18"/18" 
Laxman Aelay (born 1964) is an Indian painter. His muse has been the live of poverty stricken people from his village and specific culturality of a village with men, women against the backdrop of their homes. He likes doing monochromes.
Before Laxman Aelay chose to become a professional artist, he was a signboard painter and then a much sought after and respected designer and illustrator of books. His work was highly thought of within Telegu literary circles, but soon the painter in him compelled Aelay to enroll in college for a degree in Fine Arts, even though he had already received a Bachelor of Commerce degree.

Surekha

Artville Contemporary Artist of The Day
Surekha
Spaces of Silence
2010
Digital print on archival paper
15.5 x 11.5 in

Surekha is a contemporary Indian video artist whose works showcase themes including Indian identity and Womanhood. She has been a full time artist since 1996 and her video works have been shown at galleries outside India since 2001. Her works are known for the mix of video and physical presence, highlighting inherent experiences. Surekha has been exploring the possibilities of the video form, negotiating the public and private, locating the body as a site of contestation and appropriation. She uses photography and video to archive, document and perform.
courtesy:wiki

BAHULEYAN. C.B

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
BAHULEYAN. C.B
Transformation 1, 
Acrylic on canvas, 
66” x 48”
BAHULEYAN.C.B born in 1972,cheruthuruthy,thrissur, Kerala, India

Dhruva Mistry

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Dhruva Mistry 
Spatial Diagram 04: Golden Yellow 
Sculpture 
Stainless steel and paint 
12/12/11 in, 2009

Dhruv Mistry is an esteemed sculptor. He makes delightful mishmashes of spiritual art of ancient civilizations with the widespread art of the bazaar. A rich narrative quality is always visible in his artworks and there are various scales and styles. Works and installations by Dhruv Mistry discover art in various media such as painting, digital works, etching, sculpture, drawing, photography and dry point. The artist prefers to work with quality and scale of forms, materials and concepts. He mirrors his native tradition in his sculptures, in his themes through particular characteristics. His ability to examine, interpret and portray most ancient signs all over again makes his creations rich. His sculptures clearly shape out geometric forms.
courtesy:itasveer

Biju Jose

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Biju Jose 
Standard Function, 2007
Chrome plated steel
3 x 3 x 2 inches 

“In my work “Standard Function”, I have enlarged the common circular plastic hair-comb approximately fourteen times its actual size. The deliberate act of increasing its dimensions brings into focus minute details of structure that remain unnoticed in the object's natural size. By transforming its appearance, I want to redefine its status as a common object and rediscover its innate physicality. I perceive these mundane objects differently; these are objects that are taken for granted and even collected with ignorance of their true functionality.”

Finding more fulfillments in sculpture and installations, he uses a variety of media ranging from steel, fiberglass, found objects and such conventional materials to locally sourced organic material like betel leaves, arca nut, tobacco leaves etc that one may easily identify as being very "Indian". The content may vary between my more personal concerns like environmentalism/animal rights, and other issues like globalization and it's double-edged effects. The new age of information has also had negative eroding effects on the more traditional societies. Its mostly very personal reflections and reactions to what I observe around him.
courtesy: galeriechristianhosp

Abir Karmakar

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Abir Kamakar 
"From my photo album"
Acrylic on Canvas
36/48 in, 2004
Karmakar is known for his casual and voyeuristic self-portraits, in which he places his naked body in intimate settings. His body language and the mysterious eye contact that he makes with viewers are provocative, offering them his interpretation of sexuality and the fluid nature of identity in contemporary contexts.

Surendran Nair

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Surendran Nair 
Elysium (Cuckoonebulopolis), 
2010, oil on canvas, 180.3 × 240cm.

The artist has become known not only for his paintings, but also for his whimsical and preposterously long titles, such as "Tonight I am Coming to Visit You in Your Dream and None Will See and Question Me; Be Sure to Leave Your Door Unlocked, Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002". This series, "Cuckoonebulopolis", was the artist's primary statement in the first decade of the 21st century.
Nair became famed in India during 2000 for his painting "An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus" which depicts a naked man with strapped-on wings standing atop the Ashoka Column. An uproar was created when governing bodies dominated by right wing nationalist groups decided this painting should be rejected from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi on the grounds that it was irreverent toward a national symbol. Nair proceed to remove both himself and all of his paintings in a protest that was widely supported by India's artistic and cultural community.
courtesy:wiki

Thota Vaikuntam

Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Thota Vaikuntam
Untitled
Acrylic on canvas
35 x 47 in , 2010 

Vaikuntam paints colorful and elaborately dressed Telangana region men and seductive women. His muse is the sensuous and voluptuous women of Telengana with their omnipresent vermilion bindis, draped in colourful sarees that highlight their dusky skin.
The stylisation of a painting are a perfect foil to Indian classical dance as the figures seem to dance, as if following their creator in a statuesque movement, reminiscent of temple friezes.He uses the brightest of reds and yellows. The simple women become larger than life as they fill the small format of his paintings draped in bright Sircilla saris.

"I like using rich primary colours, which give a sense of character and depth to my paintings. Like reds and saffron and even orange, because these are essentially Indian colours. I don't like using colours that are mix of two, because they are not natural, they don't exist in surroundings around us, in our everyday life. - T. Vaikuntam"
courtesy:wiki

Sudhir Patwardhan

Sudhir Patwardhan
Station Road
Acrylic on canvas
40" x 48"
1996
Patwardhan's canvases are densely populated reflecting the hub of city life often with emphasis on the ordinary, working man. His human forms are imbued with a sense of innate dignity as they go about performing their chores in busy city streets or in suburban construction sites. Apparently realistic, the work at times brings in an imaginary, remembered space or it can be viewed from several vantage points making it multi faceted. More recently the receding and emerging figures provide a rhythmic unity to his group compositions echoing the ancient mural art of Ajanta and Ellora.
courtesy:contemporaryindianart

RM Palaniappan

R M Palaniappan 
Oxford 3 
Lithograph 
10 x 15 in, 1996 
He is internationally acclaimed as a Master print maker in area of viscosity etchings. In the past fifteen years Palaniappan’s works have focussed on the concept of motion in space, time and environment.”During my schooling, interest on science made me imagine myself as a scientist; also my deep involvement in mathematics and astronomy gave me a door way to see a new world of abstractions. Conscious dreaming of positives and building the imagination of future and its collective sensibilities put me forth to be an artist by nature. 

"No one was born as an artist or every one is an artist when they use the creative side of the brain. The physical and psychological aspect of process of creation is always a wonder when you are aware of it. No matter where you stand on the line; it is the processes of extending the line by understanding the same in all respect by the total awareness of, in and out of the line that you have created- the breath, the life and the body. 

"My formal education in art unwrapped several origins of the creative process and its aesthetics. My interest in science and psychology is becoming the subject matter of my art and thought process; art is not merely aesthetics awareness. It is visual analysis and thought; above all, it is to me an expression of Time – Space – Environment, relationship in the context of string between physical and psychological perception of the matter.

Samir Mondal

Samir Mondal 
The girl with butterflies
Watercolor on paper
2001
38 x 26 inch
Artist Samir Mondal’s most amazing contribution is a continual revival of water colour. He has endowed water colours with the status of oils, projecting a facet of water colour that was never visualized before. The artist keenly observed the characteristics of oil-painting, noted the inherent quality of oils, their richness and substance. In his endeavour to include these elements in water colour, he developed textures and structural features as if they are oils. Samir Mondal has stood the test of this fantastic versatility. His water colours have never lost their originality, their innovativeness and their classic elegance, yet they are truly modern paintings.

Dr Jayanth Manda

Dr Jayanth Manda

untitled

Acrylic on Canvas 
In his works you will find the superb combination of aesthetic appeal, imaginative interpretation and professional touch. His endeavor has been always to succeed in conveying to the observer the same emotional impact which he himself experienced. When his paintings possess this element in them, he indeed feels that his effort has been accomplished.

Krishen Khanna

Krishen Khanna
Marriage Band in a Tempo
Oil on canvas
50” x 70”, 1991
Making a gestural impact on the canvas Khanna’s masterful deployment of paint to evoke the human situation is unmatched. The thick impasto surface often seems like a prism through which figures can be discerned as if in memory or in remote areas of childhood. Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.

Rekha Rodwittiya

Rekha Rodwittiya 
Matters Of Heart 
Medium: Digital Inkjet print with autobiograhic photo images and hand-painted watercolour on Paper, 2013
Using a monumental female figure as the central focus of her canvases, the artist dots her protagonist with a full-bodied frontal view, distinguished and arresting in demeanour, often lone, unrelentingly gazing at the viewer. And she continues to stand tall – irrespective of the many representations – torture, betrayal, and celebration… from indignance to softer emotional hues… her colour palette veering from one end of the spectrum to the other to convey the ethos.

Shibu Natesan

Shibu Natesan 
Against the Wind
Painting
Oil on canvas, 2002
69.5/83 inch
Shibu Natesan lives in two countries, India and England, a situation that creates distance and dispels it at the same time, paradoxically emphasizing the anonymity, intimacy and distance in his recent works. His varied subject matter comes from the experience and his imaginative space along with the deliberate strategies he is employing in creating these photo realistic imageries.

The cultural environment in Kerala where he was trained as an artist helped him to develop his humanistic understandings and sensibilities and led him to contextualise his own work in the present situation. Here he uses images culled from popular culture, media and injects them with a sense of humour and irony. Its his take on the industrialized society and globalised economy where he addresses the repressive forms of control, power structures, racism, migration and so on.

The critical realism, Shibu is engaging with, is generated from his reflections on the presuppositions of everyday life and he achieves it by transforming them into metaphors. In his work, use of photography is more literal in which he has been able to displace or subvert the meaning without altering its appearance.

Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat 
Synonym, Installation
2009
Her practice – spanning painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporates multiple mediums into a single work. She frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work is the rubber stamp, used as an object and an imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, which both confirms and obscures identities.

Baiju Parthan

Baiju Parthan 
Acrylic & Oil on Canvas 
72/144inch 
2006 
Baiju Parthan a painter, is known as a pioneer of intermedia art in India. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of provocative, richly textured installations. 
Often described by his biographer, Ranjit Hoskote, as a ‘techno-shaman’, Baiju Parthan’s cryptic images emerge from the interdigitation of his various dabblings in the fields of engineering, botany, philosophy, mythology, technology, religion and, eventually, the internet. Unsurprisingly, the artist’s rebus-like works, frequently constructed out of two or more panels, reflect the multiple layers, both complementary and conflicting, that frame contemporary existence.

Rini Dhumal

Rini Dhumal 
Untitled, mix media on board 
26.5/22.5 
Rini Dhumal subjects are invariably women, like the mixed media on canvas “Queen”, or the depiction of the awesome Hindu Goddess Durga in the same medium; these memory-ripened, inward looking images appear deeply personal and lend an emotional climate of introspection. Then there are the bold use of fantasy and imagination, as in “Creature”. Rini’s women are usually center-stage and flanked by strange looking cats or birds, or dramatic flowers and assorted plumage. For Rini’s audience, her paintings succeed in opening a door to less bleak image of art, and life itself. 
Born 1948 in Bengal, Rini completed her Master’s in Painting from M.S.University, Baroda.

KP Reji

K.P.Reji 
To move the mountain 
Oil on canvas, 60/60 inch
2008
Reji’s paintings exude a matter of fact quality. His use of bold, slightly rounded figuration constructs a naïve style reminiscent of Gauguin. Despite - or perhaps because of - their apparent simplicity, his paintings are enigmatic and the motifs he engenders are difficult to decipher. His work is multifaceted and complex in its analysis of the individual’s relationship to his external environment. Often political in inflection, his canvases explore the connection between psychological states of mind and socio-political behavior. 

Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh

Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh,
City for Sale
oil on canvas, 
1980-84 
Sheikh paints on formats ranging from hand-held paper to architectural scale, to bring the world he knows, sees and seeks, into his life; to illumine it in its complexities and contradictions, reinventing art history while painting.

Prajakta Potnis

Prajakta Potnis,
Capsule 4, 
Archival print on hahnemuhle bamboo paper, 
24 in x 52 in, Ed. 1 of 5 AP, 
2012

In a set of photographs entitled Capsule, the stage is the interior of a refrigerator, but within the sterile glow, “escalators” freeze the mind — in malls? airports? lobbies of Mumbai’s new gleaming towers?
Courtesy of Experimenter Art Gallery and the artist.

G.R.Iranna

G.R.Iranna 
The Dead Smile 
Fiberglass And Cloth 
29/24/32 inch each (21 figures) 

G. R. Iranna : I need to take references for the exactitude of the visual form. Like the folds on the cloth, posture, colour etc which I may change in the process of painting. When you have chosen it, it becomes yours. 

On the internet I had seen a picture like this with everyone sitting steady and smiling for an arranged photograph, which is quite unreal in itself. That is what attracted me.

It is important that the whole event unfolds like a narrative before me. So I realized that in the background I needed the palanquin to give it a festive ambiance and a tiger jumping from behind suggesting action. I wanted celebration and thrill along with a tinge of cultural value- like a theatre unfolding.

I know the smile, the uniform, the tiger and the palanquin all appear like disunited elements. So, one stages them together to create one’s own story. The emotion and the involvement that evolve from this are more important. 

Born 1970, Sindgi, Bijapur, Karnataka, India
During his youth, Iranna studied in a Gurukul (a system of education where the student resides with the teacher) and lived in an ashram for almost seven years. This helped to form a strong connection to his cultural roots, which enters his work alongside his exploration of the antitheses of inherent dualities of the world. Iranna endeavors to translate an internal landscape onto tactile surfaces and aspects of Buddhist art influences are evident. Although he began painting oil on canvases, Iranna later developed his range of medium, embarking on his now primary use of tarpaulin.
The artist lives and works in New Dehli, India

Manav Gupta

Manav Gupta 
Unsung hymns of clay
Using the earthen lamp as a metaphor, Manav explores issues of environment consciousness.
Nature’s process of creation, as it exists in its timelessness,in its oneness and peace,has all the answers to man’s needs of growth and progress and development. If the human endeavor first absorbs and then adopts these answers in its developmental process, the growth from cities to mega cities and path to progress would not create silent self digging graves of human extinction.

Gieve Pattel

Gieve Pattel 
" The Letter Home "
Acrylic On Canvas
2002 
GIEVE PATEL belongs to that avant-garde grouping of artists based in Bombay and Baroda, who substantially altered the trajectory of post-colonial Indian art in the mid-1960s. Positioning themselves against the modernist sublime of the Schools of Paris and New York favoured by their immediate predecessors, they emphasised a politically engaged awareness of locality.

Deploying combinations of ironic autobiography, everyday observation and ludic fantasia, they conveyed the textures of the here-and-now, replete with the realities of labour, gender inequality, alternative sexual preference and the grotesque. Within this new spectrum of possibilities, Patel chose to focus on the streetscapes of daily life, as occupied by the marginal figure in various avatars, whether proletarian (as in his series of railway porters of the 1970s) or immiserated and destitute (as in his ironically titled “Gallery of Man” series that unfolded, through the 1980s, as a dedication to victimage, featuring, among others, a eunuch, a drowned woman and a leper). In recent years, even as he has pursued this lexicon of subaltern figures — expressionistically rendered in homage to suffering and fortitude — Patel has allowed himself a glimpse of transcendence, through the recurrent motif of the changing and magical reflections held by a deep well.
Patel lives and works in Mumbai.

B.V Suresh

B.V. Suresh 
Flashe color on paper 
Untitled 
The personal and the confessional had always characterized his work, even as a student in Baroda, when the overtones of the kind of language used by the British painter R.B. Kitaj, widely discussed at the time, was very much in evidence. A subtle shift had occurred within this larger concern while studying in London. The immediacy of the day to day which had earlier served as a focal point of reference seemed “too foreign and too superficial” to actually move him deeply and. the only meaningful source seemed to be the universality which binds the experience of suffering, transcending as it did geographical and cultural constraints. Whether it was the slaughter of contaminated reindeer in Norway or the rise of fundamentalism in India, it affected the innocent and culpable alike. Working with dense overlapping layers of paint, he created vast ambiguous areas which could accommodate the personal within the more definable configuration of the event in question, the latter conveyed through the use of recognizable symbols. 

Free-standing or hung, his work bears the familiar premonition of oppression and guilt: the viewer becomes one more component, frozen in passivity and an unwilling partner to crime; “not allowed the release or the glory of martyrdom, but only the eternal pain of the weight.”