A show to hone our sensibilities towards the contemporary in art

The Contemporary Currency is the current show in town that has brought the contemporary art of fourteen well-versed, well endowed and well-known artists from all over the country for the Amdavadi connoisseurs to view, relish and acquire.

Curated by Amadavadi curator and art consultant Jamshed Chinoy, this show started on Thursday 11th February at Hutheesing Centre and is featuring watercolour works, acrylics, oils and intaglio prints and mixed media works, etc by these artists drawn from various cities, with whom Chinoy has been working over long years in close association.

The artists included in the show depict a definitive contemporary feel and finish to their works both in terms of content and style, something for which Chinoy has curated their works for the sake of audiences in the city especially connoisseurs in his circuit and has also vouched for that factor in his curatorial note.

The show display starts with five Untitled watercolour works by Ashish Kushwaha which look like statements on poaching and hunting while one of them seems to portray the everyday ‘burden’ in the life of a labourer literally. These works stand out for their visual appeal in light colours and with their miniaturised objects.

Babu Xavier offers his acrylic works from his Elephant series, three of them featuring duos – an adult with a calf elephant – while a fourth work, a landscape, also offers the hint of an elephant moving through what has to be a dense forest. A fifth one is a take on Ganesha and a sixth features Christ – a subdued form in hints of white and grey enveloped in creeper flora on both sides. Except for this work about Christ, bright colours are the hallmark of Xavier’s creations on show.

In fact bright and vibrant colours and stylized bold forms are also the highlight of many other artists, viz Birendra Pani, Mrinal Dey, Nayanaa Kanodiya and Rajendra Kapse.

Hailing from Odisha, Pani generally draws on elements of folk and miniature art and Chhau dance for his repertoire. His present works Vishwsroopam Returns and New Urban Avatars 1, 2 and 3 seem to juxtapose the mythological with modern sensibilities and elements. The Avtars 1and 2 portray males in some kind of a jetsetting mode and yet are held back by webs of present day complexity. The Avtar 3 depicts an ardh-nari – a half female with the head and neck of a stag – a form that reverses on the mermaid, another kind of ardh-nari.

Nayanaa a self taught artist puts together in her four very colourful works the stories and themes related to women, who are created in prominent forms; one of which is about the female practitioners of the acrobatic form of Maharashtrian Malkhambh.

Dey and Kapse stand out for their unique obese, strange-looks-in-eyes male forms which are all colourful and have bold proportions within the frames of the canvas; the objects also look like staring at you as if to ask for a conversation in spirituality.

Dileep Sharma has gone back in history and indulged in reminiscing about interesting characters like painters Frida Kahlo, Amrita Shergill and legendary spy Mata Hari as also the singer-performer Shakira by doing their etching intaglio portraits. His central and bigger work though titled Sunflower is also a human form enchantingly done to adorn the central space that it occupies in his display cluster.

Laxman Aelay of Nalgonda in Andhra has a reputation as a “nostalgic painter” who in a manner typical to nostalgia writing or painting, returns to his own milieu again and again for his creative stories. His five works on show are all figurative, four of which are in the visually interesting series Songs of the Village and depict local people interacting with each other as they are caught in different moods in group situations. Another lone work from his Polamma series depicts a dark-hued middle aged woman and throws up similarities of visual elements used by other artists from the region.

The most pricey of this contemporary set of artists and an individual having diverse interests, much shown around and celebrated with awards, Madhuri Bhaduri indulges in some abstraction to create her mountainscape Horizons, skyscape with a Blue Moon and two seascapes all in oil colours, which stand out majestically in the show space for their colour mix and resultant aural impact.

Sanjeev Sonpimpare engages with the idea of reconstruction in urban spaces in the context of architectural as well as cultural heritage. One of his current works correlates with the redevelopment of the Central Vista in the national capital. Done in black and white acrylics on canvas, three of Sanjeev’s works thus speak for Today Times.

Other artists whose half-abstract or geometrical works are displayed in the show include Hemraj, Pratul Dash, Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi and Yashwant Deshmukh.

In fact Chaturvedi’s mixed media works Anthropoid Butterfly done as a triptych and another work Previous Upcoming done as a four part collective present a visual treat with modelled figures, other elements and an overarching fine balance of colours and forms appearing in the frames.

This rather unique and off beat show laboriously pieced together by bringing in sixty odd works from artists located out of Ahmedabad is on till 21st February and is worth a visit to hone one’s sensibilities as to what is contemporary in fine art and also is ‘currency’ for future!