Thursday 18 December 2014

T.M.Azis


Artville Artist Of The Day
T M Azis
Untitled
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 30 x 22"

"I have never been particular about maintaining a style. I realize that experiences change with time. I accept the new environment, people and also like to adapt new techniques and colors".

Originally from Kerala, T.M. Azis is known to create human figures interacting with the other elements in a painting. Figures or objects performing as symbols spinning around allegories as conceived by the artist. He creates paintings, which record what might be ordinary, everyday occurrences, contemplated by him. A certain insight into behavioral thought, we realise that there is a world different from what see – the world that exists in our minds.

It is interesting to note that there are no decisive tactics, no fixed strategies in his work. Azis allows himself to be influenced by places around him and situations that he encounters. Simple objects and people in their vicinities rejoice in their existence by being involved in what is around.

The paintings do not project a grand décor, and even with its simplicity there is a certain magic and lightness about it. The different conversations performed by figures with the ‘designs’ lines or concentric circles in the paintings pleasantly create subtle movements on the surface reciting a visual rhythm to the viewer.

The paintings are constructed using bright colors sometimes and sometimes not so contrasting colors, which plainly have strong individual personas expressing a subtle theater of visual form.

In today’s contemporary art scenario, artists are fast adapting to new trends. T.M. Azis, primarily a painter, has also a prolific collection of photographs taken during the collaborative projects with other artists.

A graduate in painting from the Trivandrum Art College, he went further on to study at the Jamia Mila Islamia University in Delhi. He had his first show in the late 80’s and since then has held a number of solo exhibitions. He has also participated in several group shows in Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi and been a part of numerous camps held across the country.

Azis presently lives and works in Bangalore.
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #figurative #popularart #contemporaryartist #tmaziz #artville#schoolofart

Tuesday 16 December 2014

T.V.Santosh


Artville Artist Of The Day 
T. V. Santhosh,
Untitled,
Year: 2012,
Medium: oil on canvas,
Size: 48 x 96 inches 

Adopting and manipulating media-generated images, T.V. Santhosh uses his body of work to raise ethical and philosophical questions about the current culture of violence we are immersed in, and the skewed ways in which it is represented to us. Santhosh’s paintings expose the multiple readings inherent in the situations they depict, forcing us to pause and question the veracity of the images and information we receive on a daily basis through the current news media.

By inverting their colours and turning them into their negatives, the artist moves away from chronologic and geographic specificity, conferring these works with global resonance. Illuminating and problematizing the pervasive nature of violence in contemporary society, the artist notes that his recent work is “…not just about terrorism that comes out of religious fundamentalism. It is about the violence terrorism unleashes and the counter measures the state employs which actually is more violence. At the end of the day, it is innocent people and the ordinary citizens who are sacrificed. So my work is more of a critique and I am not trying to provide any answers to the question of violence” (as quoted in “Interview – 2007: T.V. Santhosh with Baiju Parthan”, Unresolved Stories, the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, pg.17).

The present lot depicts an armed force personnel in a candid moment. However, the title of the work Torn Flag makes the picture anything but that. The painting speak does not of ideologies. Rather, Santhosh picks up on the humanitarian aspect that is often submerged in lofty agendas. He achieves this by isolating that one moment from the barrage of images and freezes it in time.
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist #santhoshtv #artville#schoolofart

Monday 15 December 2014

Prajakta Palav Aher


Artville Artist Of The Day 
Prajakta Palav Aher
Title: Kachra I
Medium: Watercolour and acrylic on paper
Size: 21.5 x 27.5 in 

Prajakta Palav is an artist of the intimate and the ordinary; forsaking complex narratives and layers of metaphor, Palav's quirky work exposes the beauty inherent in the irregular and commonplace. To Palav, "beauty is not a utopian ideal that can only flourish when we suppress all news of the septic tank of humanity. Her art grows from the gift of apperception, conscious and reflective looking, which blurs the distinctions between real and synthetic, nature and artifice" (Nancy Adajania, "Bonsais or Bullets: Prajakta Palav's Oblique Portraits of the Middle Class", Corners, Gallery Beyond exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2005, unpaginated).

In her series of works titled Kachra or garbage, Palav has carried her almost irreverent aesthetic forward from the perfect domestic interiors where she disclosed concealed indiscretions and probed the notion of desire, to public rubbish dumps outside, where everyone's undesired refuse lies in plain sight. In the present lot, a close-up of a vivid recycling dump, the artist challenges her viewers' conceptions of beauty, desire and the frameworks they inhabit. As Adajania explains, "…this is art that takes garbage as its subject, and yet achieves beauty. Since the refuse is represented in extreme close-ups, it ceases to have caste inflections and loses connotations of ecological threat. Instead, one could say that Palav transforms these images into pattern-based abstractions…Thus intimately framed, the synthetic materials appear natural, or then like elements of a fantasia" (Ibid.).
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist#prajaktapalavaher #artville #schoolofart

Saturday 13 December 2014

Nalini Malani


Artville Artist of The Day
Nalini Malani
Title: The sense of touch,
Year: 2009,
Medium: Numerical pigmentary print,
Size: 54,6 x 76 cm

Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue.

Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.
courtesy:tasneem

#art #print #limitededition #contemporaryartist #popularart #nalinimalani#artville #artschool

Friday 19 September 2014

Roy Thomas


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Roy Thomas. 
Title: We're all in the Same Boat, 
Year: 1984,
Medium: acrylic on canvas, 
Size:122 x 228 cm,
private collection.

Anishinaabe painter Roy Thomas was one of the most influential aboriginal artists in Canada, and was famous for paintings of colourful totemic animals. Like Norval Morrisseau, he became well known when aboriginal art gained mainstream popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He grew up in the Longlac reservation in northern Ontario, and like other Native youth of his generation was forced to attend a religious residential school. His distinctive style can be seen in the art of younger aboriginal artists, many of whom he had mentored.
courtesy:wikipedia

#art #painting #figurative #popularat #contemporaryartist #roythomas#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Thursday 18 September 2014

Prasanta Sahu


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Prasanta Sahu 
Title: Blueprint of an imaginary situation 2
Medium: Acrylic on canvas 
Size: 122x122 cm

Commingling pictures and text, Sahu borrows motifs from the mass media. The black and white photographic images adopt a documentary style of address, presenting a snippet of everyday reality, such as we would be likely to find in a newspaper or magazine clipping. Yet, in Sahu's oeuvre, this process of citation operates on multiple levels.

The artist is intensely aware of the pictorial surface of the canvas. Monochromatic pictures are contrasted with vividly painted areas and abrasions on the canvas form interesting textural motifs. However, in his work Sahu moves away from the high-modernist obsession with the formal properties of the painted surface. The paintings operate as performative gestures connecting the realms of art and society.

For example, if Sahu draws attention to the materiality of the canvas through deliberately disfiguring its surfaces, the technique also highlights the symbolic importance of the image thus blemished. Violence is enacted on the pictorial surface, so that art is no longer the terrain of isolated intellectual pleasure, it becomes part and parcel of our social and political environment: both implicated in its aggression and a place for critique.

As such, Sahu's painting functions as social commentary. Acutely conscious of the inherent conflicts in the urban condition, his works draw ironic, sometimes poignant, attention to its underlying brutality and cloaked hypocrisies. The crowd forms a familiar theme in his canvases. Through the depiction of its seething mass of faces, the artist analyses common human sentiments and the complicated relation between individual consciousness and collective deeds.
courtesy: saffronart

#art #painting #figurative #popularat #contemporaryartist #prasantasahu#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Monday 15 September 2014

Chintan Upadhyay


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Chintan Upadhyay
Title: SIMPLY A SAMPLE
Year: 2008
Medium: Oil and acrylic on canvas
Size: 84 x 180 in.

The subject of Upadhyay’s work is often babies, animated and stylized against a bold solid background, they are stripped of the simplicity of their vulnerable nature. From blank slate to something slightly more affected, the imagery of culture is impressed upon them visually in tattoo like designs.

The artist began as a painter, but now creates sculptures and installations of which he paints the surface. His most popular sculpture project is perhaps the “Pet Shop” project, which is an ongoing production of a “model baby” for every season. It’s a social critique on consumer society; in a similar vein a solo exhibition of Upadhyay’s at Nagpal Gallery, Mumbai was provocatively named Designer Babies. Transforming painting and sculpture into a pop art hybrid, the painted imagery is often sourced from traditional Indian miniature painting, so on the whole the pieces tend to look forward and look back at the same time.
courtesy:aicon

#art #painting #figurative #babies #popularart #contemporaryartist#chinthanupadyay #artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Saturday 13 September 2014

K.G.Subramanyan



Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
K G Subramanyan
Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 60 x 300 in 
This one of the work comprises five canvases, each measuring 60 x 60 in

K.G. Subramanyan is among the few artists who have explored the possibilities of modern art from a different perspective, giving new dimensions to the human figure by making them appear more as characters from various myths and traditional narratives, populating a composition quite the contrary. As an artist he is extraordinarily versatile, cherishing the facility to work in diverse media, sizes, and techniques over a stylistic conformity to a single medium, genre, size, technique, and manner of visualization.

A prolific writer, scholar, teacher and art historian, Subramanyan uses his in-depth knowledge of various artistic traditions to create fantastical images of wit and eroticism that are universal in their appeal, yet coupled with iconic symbols drawn from Indian legends and folklore. Subramanyan has time and again aimed at blurring the boundaries between art and the artisan. The artist has also dabbled in glass painting and toy making, even weaving, which is generally considered ‘artisanal’. Even in his written works, the exploration of art as a language or means of communication is a recurring theme. Subramanyan has also illustrated as well as authored fiction for children.
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #figurative #popularart #contemporaryartist #kgsubramanian#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Thursday 11 September 2014

A Ramachandran



Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
A Ramachandran 
Title: Mahua Tree 
Medium: Oil on Canvas 
Size: 78" x 162"

A. Ramachandran is one of India’s most distinguished and prolific artists who has ceaselessly experimented with visual language for more than four decades. His art is both contemporary and Indian in essence. Painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and art educationist, Ramachandran has explored diverse mediums and scales, with a dynamic personal vision and distinctive artistic style. He began this journey as an expressionist painter exploring the predicament of human condition and misery, that too, on a monumental scale. Already politically sensitized by his early life in Kerala, the poverty and suffering he witnessed on the streets of Kolkata and subsequently in New Delhi moved him to produce grim contorted human images, literally representing human beings as headless entities. Suffused with social imagery, his early works re-enacted themes of exploitation, oppression, war, human brutality, and political violence.
courtesy:artoframachandran

#art #oilpainting #figurative #mahuatree #popularart #contemporaryartist#aramachandran #artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Valay Shende


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
VALAY SHENDE
Untitled, 
Year: 2014
Medium: mixed media on stainless steel discs
Size: 10 1/2 × 7 1/2 in

Inspired by his surroundings, Shende uses his body of work to capture the challenges and dichotomies that characterize India today, particularly the striking divide between modern and industrial views on one hand, and traditional religious ones on the other. His recent sculptures, unique in both their process and scale, are intricately built out of minute metal discs, pocket watches, copper-plated fiberglass and other non-traditional materials. The combination of video art and sculptural installations in his practice is also unique, adding an entirely new dimension to classical ideas of sculpture.
Courtesy:saffronart

#art #sculpture #ironbox #popularart#contemporaryartist #valayshende#artvillecontemporary #artvillegallery

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Yusuf Arakkal



Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
Yusuf Arakkal,
Title: Generation Gap,
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Year: 2001
His early abstract paintings with colors reflecting the superficial glamour of city life were followed in the mid-' 70s by compositions with wheels, drainage pipes and other geometrisized structures which referred to wretched living conditions of the urban poor. Soon his concern with people and wider social issues made him focus on the human figure, though always seen as bound with, even defined by the environment. After a few canvases of a partly super realistic nature dealing with drought, famine, untouchability, etc. He reached his constant style which has a link with a realist basis but generalizes it with a graceful, if non-specific roughness. One of such paintings depicting inhabitants of pipes and pavements won him a national award in 1983. Arakkal works in series of related images- from sensual, icon-like ladies to sick in hospital beds and wheelchairs, urchins playing with kites and paper masks, ironic images of paper politicians and empty chairs bearing human presence. "Throughout he has depicted working -class and village people set against dilapidated walls, among shaky planar divisions, hazy texturing and diffused to sharp and vibrating arbitrary chiaroscuro, all partially enclosed by the frames-within-aflame motif. His figures in moods ranging from vaguely atmospheric to restless, dejection, quiet joy and sensuousness, are flattened as well as plastic, emerging from and nearly dissolving into their backgrounds. Arakkal has worked also with sculpture in wood, stone, ceramic and bronze, did collages, graphics and water colors. He writes poetry and articles on art.
courtesy:contemporaryindianart

Monday 8 September 2014

Jitish Kallat


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Jitish Kallat
Untitled (Eclipse)
Year:2009
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 78 x 138 in 

Jitish Kallat "…is among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community; he examines the life of labour, commemorates the cyclerickshaw puller and the load-bearing porter. And he records these phenomena, not as impersonal socialscientific memoranda, but through the tender, terrifying immediacy of the painted surface"
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #figurative #popularart #contemporaryartist #jitishkalllat#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Sunday 7 September 2014

Thota Vaikuntam


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Thota Vaikuntam 
Untitled 
Medium : Acrylic on Canvas 
Size: 137 x 122 cm

Thota Vaikuntam hails from Andhra Pradesh, in South India, and finds his inspiration in the rural areas of the state. Men and women of his village are often the central characters of his work. Telangana women, in particular, are frequent subjects for his works. The obsession can be traced back to his childhood, when he used to be fascinated by the male artists who used to impersonate female characters in the travelling theatre groups that performed in his village. He admits finding the women of his village very sensuous and that he only attempts to capture their vibrancy.

In an interview with Saffronart, the artist explains his early apprehensions when it came to art. “…In private I began sketching images which were very Indian, but which I thought were quite shocking. They were very obviously inspired by the spiritual and sensuous tradition that’s part of Indian mythology and art. I hid them from public eye, because I thought they were very sexual.”

Vaikuntam’s art has a sense of strength to it, a power that emanates from the paint or charcoal that he applies to the surface, from his controlled lines, and from the fine strokes that he executes. He generally uses only primary colours, as he believes that composite colours do not exist in nature and are therefore, unnatural. As he explains, “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”.
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #figurative #popularart #coontemporaryartist #thotavaikuntam#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Saturday 6 September 2014

Puja vaish


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
Puja Vaish
Title: structure, De Sign and Play
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 9 x 9 ff (9 panels of 3 x 3 ft approx)
Year: 2007 

Puja is a visual artist from Delhi who has done her graduate and post-graduate studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. She has received the Nasreen Mohamedi scholarship for Painting and has exhibited her work in several shows. Having taught at the Fine Arts faculty, Baroda and at the Delhi College of Art, she is currently teaching at the Raheja College of Art & Architecture, Mumbai.
courtesy:storyltd

#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist #pujavaish#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Thursday 4 September 2014

Om Soorya


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Om Soorya 
Title: Illuminated
Medium: Oil On Canvas 

Om Soorya paints surreal landscapes that are occupied by both negative and positive energies, which he depicts in many different forms.
His use of pigment is fluid and intuitive. The mood created by his rich deep tones and lines, which vary from crisp to watery blurs, is much like a twilight zone – the time in-between events; neither here nor there. The absence of figuration in Soorya’s works renders these already isolated environments even more abandoned, making them seem as though they are frozen in time and space.
Soorya has always maintained that aesthetics are just as important as content. Lighting plays an integral role in creating the transcendental feel that his paintings have, as also in giving them their ethereal glow. Together with the other elements of his compositions, it enables the viewer to sense the fragile relationship between the meditative Zen-like quality of the painting and the overwhelming anxieties of material living.
As the artist notes, “My recent works are an extension of the style of painting which I have been practicing for a few years. When I started this language, my main concern and challenge was how to have a dialogue between the conventional idea of painting and new urban visions; how to bring a meditative space of silence from new urban complexities. The new Indian urban man satisfies his spiritual and meditative sensualities by visually consuming the new landscape from a very different perspective. In reality we don’t have time to spend enjoying a sunset or sunrise. Everywhere there is wall in the wall, a very flat surface of ideas. What all we have is a breath of silence when we see a panoramic night view from our apartment terrace. The urban man has limited his spiritual quest to his new possible positive visual sensibilities. In a very informative world chatting on the internet has assumed the form of chanting mantras. Surfing has become a kind of mediation. The new generation has learned to consume an alternative physical space for its own existence. Here my paintings are limited to explore these possibilities of visual sensibilities. While the world is shrinking to the space of a shell, the imaginative space is exploding to new sensibilities. By creating a very personalized landscape of language what I want to provide is a breathing meditative space of visual reality.”
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #landscape #surrealist #popularart#contemporaryartist #omsoorya #artvillecontemporary#artgallery

Tuesday 2 September 2014

T.M.Aziz


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
T M Aziz
Untitled
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 60 x 34

His work is figurative, drawing from the spaces within him. According too Aziz, his art both conceals and reveals his mind, as it takes cognizance of the phenomenal world. His works have been described as aiming at sense of universal, perhaps spiritual, connectedness of things elemental and human. He has also been described as an artist who desists metaphors or ironies and arrives at a cold depiction of simple motifs that are surrealistic in their position on the surface.
courtesy:threshold

#art #oilpainting #figurative #popularart #contemporaryartist #tmazis#artvillecontemporary #artgallery

Monday 1 September 2014

Murali Cheeroth


Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day 
Murali Cheeroth
Untitled
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 20in x 40in

Artist Statement:
..my working process is a kind of extraction system, that draws on tiny concerns about uber urbanization, frenzied globalization and the visual/virtual stimulation therein, and folds and unfolds them into another reality to simplify their characteristics and relationships in order to build a new visual experience that is clear and vivid.
Courtesy: initial access

#art #oilpainting #figurativestyle #popularart #contemporaryartist#muralicheeroth #artvillecontemporary #artgallery