Artville Artist Of the Day Baiju ParthanTitle: Soft GraffitiYear: 2010Medium: Acrylic and gel on canvas
Size: 47.5 x 71.5 in
Initially, Baiju Parthan resisted a career as an artist. "In Kerala," he explains, "you are what your work is. And in Kerala's Communist schema, the artist is at the lowest rung of society." Parthan began as an engineer, but was drawn into the world of art in 1974, when he stumbled onto a book detailing the history of Western art. "With that book," he says, "the chronology and the institution of art became known to me." He became familiar with the movements of Impressionism, Expressionism, and so forth, and this new knowledge nourished his interest in painting.
"Painting gave me self worth," says Parthan. "In that pictorial space, I was king. I began to define myself through this act of painting: It was the only place where I could 'be'." Excited by the prospect of studying art, Parthan went to Goa and enrolled in a five-year course in the fine arts. Parthan's course, running from 1978-1983, overlapped with the final influx of Westerners coming to Goa in search of enlightenment.
"There were Germans, Brits, Italians - all sorts of people, mostly from Europe. I came across these hippies, and became exposed to a whole range of alternate world views," says Parthan, adding "I had always thought that reality is one unified thing."
Through one of his Western acquaintances, Parthan came across Sartre's "Age of Reason," a book that he describes as a major influence. Also affecting his work at the time was Goa's "soft drug culture". This, too, helped Parthan explore new ways of experiencing the world.
Parthan began to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence. Parthan names Larry Rivers, Miro, and the Cubist painters as important models.
In the early 1980s, Parthan decided to quit painting. "I felt like a missionary for Western art," he explains. Instead, he enrolled in a course on comparative mythology at Bombay University, and began working as a writer and illustrator. He returned to painting in the early 1990s, when he began to explore the imagery of mandalas and Tibetan tangas. These traditional subjects were balanced by his reading in post-modern theorists. The latter enabled him to "recontextualize things from my immediate environment. The post-modern theorists have accepted the localization of reality. We're now reconciled to the idea of an individual reality. Art is about local realities. Personally, I live in a post-colonial concept of space. The world exists as a flux."
In 1995, Parthan began to study computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machine, and creating programs. "I didn't want to be afraid of technology," says Parthan. "The machine has become the Other for humans, and it raises philosophical issues that we have to grapple with." Parthan is especially interested in the influence of technology on religious beliefs, the implications of genetic engineering, and the possibilities of post-humanism (i.e. the development of symbiotic relations between men and machines).
Based on:
Catalogue by Ranjit Hoskote
Interview by Sylee Gore
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist#baijuparthan #artville #artgallery
Artville Artist Of The DaySubodh GuptaUntitledYear: 2009Medium: Stainless steelSize: Height: 47 in (119.4 cm)
Width: 42 in (106.7 cm)
Depth: 17.5 in (44.4 cm)
In the early 1990s, several significant local and global socioeconomic transformations were set in motion, which manifestly altered the lives of people in India, particularly its growing middle-class. As geographical borders became increasingly nominal and the Indian economy opened its doors and windows to the world, the aspirations and mobility of the country's newly-affluent middle class soared to previously unimagined heights .
Through his art, executed in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, performance, video and photography, Subodh Gupta seeks to negotiate these changes, examining both the successes and failures they resulted in. In his large-scale, almost Duchampian installations of ready-mades like the present lot, the artist charts the frictions that have resulted from recent social and geographical migrations of 'The Great Indian Middle-Class', raising issues of identity, stereotyping, consumerism, the assignation of subjective values to particular goods, and the persistence of unique patterns of production and consumption in India. In so doing, the artist effectively underscores the distinctiveness and complexity of each country and community's development, negating single-model hypotheses.
To reflect India's unique growth and to voice his concerns about the new and undefined interstitial spaces that have come to exist between modernity and tradition, city and country, Gupta has fittingly chosen one of India's most unique commodities as his medium: the shiny stainless-steel kitchenware that is a familiar sight in homes and stores across the country. "For more than ten years, Subodh Gupta has been using the common steel goods of Indian kitchens as one of the primary materials for his art…Outside of India, in the world capitals of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, where culture is capital and artistic expression is the highest form of entrepreneurship, these steel objects look to be revelatory, as they certainly are in their superb encapsulation of form, function, materiality and economic rationality. Inside of India, these objects may appear as unsophisticated, old-fashioned, awkward and, to many, embarrassing and indicative of the inherited weight of the past (including poverty, the caste system, rampant corruption and a lugubrious Socialist State). The success of Subodh's sculptures using these objects is not this either/or situation…but that their meaning and reception in either locale emphasizes this crisis of identity India is now experiencing, both for itself and how it is perceived by others" (Peter Nagy, "Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime", START.STOP, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2007, not paginated).
courtesy:saffronart
#art #sculpture #stilllife #steel #popularart #contemporaryartist#subodhgupta #artville #artgallery
Artville Artist Of The Day
CF.John
Title: Untitled
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 35"x36"
Year: 2010
C. F. John, one of southern India’s promising artists, is an ardent nature lover. His native state of Kerala and its lovely landscapes have enriched the artist’s visual angle. Apart from being an artist, he is also a social activist; he has lived and among the tribal people. The artist finds his inspiration from those who are close to nature.
Becoming an artist was a long cherished dream for him. He was obsessed with nature since his childhood, gazing at the twinkling stars at night, going fishing after midnight appealed to his artistic sensibility. Being with nature gave him a solace. For him nature was always the driving force of energy, an energy that he had experienced in the lap of nature.
He seeks to define the relationship of art with time and tries to find out whether or not art is bound by the present? John’s works have several pathways for longer journeys, not essentially visual but physical, belonging to different times, spaces and eras, all at once, according to the viewer’s preparedness.
In one of his projects titled ‘Walls of Memories’ he collaborated with fellow artist T. M. Aziz and dancer Tripura Kashyap. This project was centered around two dried up wells at Visthar on the outskirts of the city near Narayana pura village, Bangalore
According the artist, an unused car can be dismantled and sold as spare parts, a ruined building can be demolished, but what do we do with a dry well? Is it an empty space to be filled or a space filled with memories?
“My works are contextual but not topical,” he says. His work has a freshness that is not constrained by academic intrusions. John’s approach to his work is devoid of canonistic estrangements and is derived from a thought process based on his socio culture activist tendencies –refined and sensitively filtered down to basics. This approach has created a body of works that seeks an imagery that is positively individualistic.
He believes in celebrating the uniqueness of the materials he uses to paint. The works by John are broadly under two titles: “Fibres of Hope” and “Fragile Memories. In these works the material is an integral part of art. The material does not efface itself in being subservient to mere usefulness in making art. The art sets forth the material and the material sets forth the art, as the temple sculpture sets forth the stone and the stone, the sculpture. “Fragile Memories” is based on reflections and experiences of fibres, more specifically reflections on Indian national flag.
Since 1986 C. F. John has been organizing Art workshops and exhibitions on specific themes such as ‘the violence of modern-day living’, the worlds views of indigenous communities,’ celebration of cultural pluralism,’
The recent series of paintings C. F .John working on is titled ‘Four Corners of a Line’.
The paintings from ‘Four Corners of a Line’ focus on the negotiation and balancing we make with gravity and speed. This negotiation and balancing is a metaphor for human relations, connecting one another and with the earth. In this balancing act or connectedness we experience and celebrate beauty, love, understanding and freedom. This is the balance of planes, of geometrical lines and shapes, as well as of the rational and emotional in human existence. Here the emotions that are dynamic also meet with its stillness / silence.
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #figurative #contemporaryartist #popularart #cfjohn #artville#artgallery
Artville Artist Of The Day Sudhir PatwardhanTitle: Street CornerMedium: Acrylic on canvasSudhir Patwardhan’s works, particularly his large format canvases such as the present lot, carry forward the simultaneously intimate and complex relationship that he has shared with his city, Mumbai, for several decades now. Today, Mumbai and its suburban sister, Thane, where the self-taught artist resides, form one of the largest, most congested, and certainly most contradictory conurbations in the world. As fellow Mumbai artist, Jitish Kallat, explains, it is “…at once dynamic and dysfunctional…a heady hodgepodge of languages, castes, religions and class difference. Life in the gargantuan metropolis goes on, precariously balancing commerce and corruption, affluence and abject poverty, swelling real estate prices and rampant homelessness”
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #cityscape #popularart #contemporaryartist#sudhirpatwardhan #artville #artschool
Artville Artist Of The Day TAKASHI MURAKAMITitile: Tan Tan Bo—In Communication,Year: 2014Medium: Acrylic, gold leaf, and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panelSize: 141 3/4 x 141 3/4 inches
Takashi Murakami was born in 1962 in Tokyo, and received his BFA, MFA and PhD from the Tokyo University of the Arts (formerly the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). He founded the Hiropon factory in Tokyo in 1996, which later evolved into Kaikai Kiki, an art production and art management corporation. In addition to the production and marketing of Murakami's art and related work, Kaikai Kiki functions as a supportive environment for the fostering of emerging artists. Murakami is also a curator, a cultural entrepreneur, and a critical observer of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, he organized a paradigmatic exhibition of Japanese art titled “Superflat,” which traced the origins of contemporary Japanese visual pop culture in historical Japanese art. He has continued this work in subsequent impactful exhibitions such as “Coloriage” (Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 2002) and “Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subcultures” (Japan Society, New York, 2005). In 2011, he organized the “New Day: Artists for Japan” international charity auction at Christie’s New York in response to the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami.
courtesy:gagosian
#art #painting #japaneseartist #contemporary #takashimurakami #artville#artgallery
Artville Artist Of The Day Artist: Manisha Gera Baswani Year: 2009Title: Never ending storyMedium: Watercolor tea water pencil colors dry pastel guache on paper body
Manisha Gera Baswani, a modern day artist brings forth the Age old Indian miniature, folk & wall painting tradition into the Contemporary art language. Her paintings draw inspiration from the iconoclastic images--be it from the pop world of Elvis, James Bond, Pizza to the Geet Govind depiction of Krishna.
Manisha has successfully integrated the use of space, flat use of colour, decorative friezes together with multi-dimensional perspectives employed in Indian miniatures to her advantage with Modern day elements of a "Hin-glish" culture. Her series of works span from Dial A Pizza, James Bond in a Nathdwara Haweli to her current foray in oils and watercolours on Space-scapes and Elvis Presley.
Manisha has trained under the guidance of her Guru A. Ramachadaran, a renowned veteran Indian Artist. She went on a French Government scholarship to study in Paris in 1993 and has also been awarded the National Scholarship and Junior Fellowship from the Government of India.
She has exhibited extensively in India and abroad and her work is part of the National Gallery of Modern Art.
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #mixmedia #contemporaryartist #popularart#artville#artgallery
Artville Artist Of The Day Bharti KherTitle: The rinky-dink pantherMedium: Bindis on fiberglassSize: 43 x 24 x 24 cmYear: 2004
Bharti Kher’s is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her art. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.
Presently, Kher uses the ‘bindi’, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as the central motif and most basic building block in her work. Bharti Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as ‘action paintings’. Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-coloured bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures, embellished with bindis, and her digital photography.
Courtesy:saffronart
#art #installation #bindis #contemporaryartist #popularart #bhartikher #artville#artschool
