Face To Face With Art, Talent and Experience at Gufa

Vis-a-Vis Art Gallery Vadodara has brought together MSU alumni to give Ahmedabad a feel-good art experience. The showcase is a wonderful confluence of artistic expressions as veteran artists are exhibiting their artworks with blooming painters for the first time at Amdavad Ni Gufa.

The unseasonal rain all along with Ockhi cyclone has left the  ambience of Ahmedabad chilly and nippy drizzly, quite unusual from the regular scorch. People tying conjugal bonds shifted their venues indoors or postponed their D-Day due to the blustery weather in Ahmedabad. The blizzard has affected election arrangements, scheduled on December 9, 2017, across Gujarat and many political campaigns and rallies have either been reshuffled or cancelled. While the world was saving themselves from the rains, the cold atmosphere couldn’t affect the art fraternity of Ahmedabad as artists continued to celebrate the opening of Face to Face art exhibition at the cultural landmark of the city, Amdavad Ni Gufa. Things were set in motion during the evening hours of December 5, 2017, in the presence of few but keen connoisseurs of art.

The exhibition is featuring seven artists under the banner of Vis-a-Vis Art Gallery, an art incubation studio set up by entrepreneur Vipul Patel in Vadodara that promotes ten artists every year to help them create a streamlined body of work. Patel has also carved the frames for many paintings displayed currently at the exhibitions and when we asked about his intimacy with art the usually refraining Patel shared, “I am an art collector who likes being surrounded with artists. And my effort lies in promoting artists and save their talent.”

Atin Basak’s paintings

The curation embodies the title ‘Face to Face’ subtly as onlookers have an opportunity to glance the work of veteran Bengali watercolourist Atin Basak’s demonstrative clowns facing the kaleidoscopic landscapes of Nabibakhsh Mansoori. Mansoori, who is still not over with his theme of wonderlands has an elite dexterity of lucidly making manifold elements in vividly coloured negative spaces of a canvas. And Basak’s soft colour palette clowns is a tempest of human emotions framed beautifully with wooden borders. It is pleasing to see the veterans come forward and put their works amidst the art of maturing painters. I think its a healthy intervention for the artistic progress.

The blooming prodigy painter Mansoor Mansoori, in his fourth exhibtion,  has flipped the canvas to get a beige effect to his works. The young MSU alumnus has used charcoal with a combination of Gerua mud and oil colours to show the evolution of human habits. The object d’ art artist Raj More has used charcoal to narrate the hustle and bustle of a diminutive town was compact yet majestic. While Yuvraj Patil’s luminous creation of the Wide-Eyed Crow and Gazing Kareena paintings will stare at you till the time you are roaming around the gallery. More and Patil weren’t physically present to narrate their methodology, but their works had enough in it to to fill for the painters physical absence.

A crowd of debating spectators grabbed my eyeballs, who were discussing over the painting method of Sanket Viramgami who used oil and acrylic mediums intermingling within a single painting. Viramgami has given the wavy texture of acrylic around oil painted figures which looked like the Kantha stitch of Bengal and Odisha. “I wanted to enlarge the Pahadi miniature Indian paintings.” shared Viramgami who hails from Surendranagar, Gujarat.  The contributing artist Subhakar Tadi came from the financial capital of AP, Visakhapatnam and spent his entire childhood around shipyards. His paintings recount the life of painters who paint gigantic ships, while he explained, “I wanted to showcase the abstract quality hidden in the texture of ships through my paintings.”

The 19 artworks are open to all spectators until December 10, 2017, from 04:00 pm to 08:00 pm. The experience indeed invoked a feel-good factor within me, and I am sure the appreciation from connoisseurs will add to the confidence of the young artists. It also helps an appreciator view the works of young minds, carefully displayed in front of the collectors favorites.