A Lick of Night in the Morning

Vadehra Art Gallery is exhibiting a compelling group exhibition featuring prominent contemporary artists Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Balkrishna Doshi, Gieve Patel, N.S. Harsha, Sudhir Patwardhan and Ranbir Kaleka titled A Lick of Night in the Morning, curated by writer and curator Dipti Anand. The exhibition will be on display at our contemporary gallery from 27 September to 28 October 2022.

A Lick of Night in the Morning considers how the fleeting existence of time has occupied the imaginations across cultures and fuelled obsessions with relevancy and practice – how to mark it, tame it, overpower it, and outlive it. Even as the intellect reigns in parsing and piecing together our daily cognitions, only the sensory possession of the world can cause delight in us – and suddenly a fleeting existence of time becomes populated by a flurry of impressions, which when secured together give us a fabric of selfhood. Moreover, it is not beauty itself but our response to beauty – its equal presence and absence – that commands our sensitivity, which is a perspective inherent in an artist’s relativist approach to material, subject and form. In itself, a state of overwhelm is chaotic sublime, a kind of sensory overload where the intensification of experience, through things of “beauty”, must somehow be managed. As the debate ensues, we may pause for a moment to consider: within the framework of twenty-first century aesthetics, how might we read a curation of artworks that prompt sensorial interactions as their content?

The show features particular contributions built at the helm of understanding that the senses are a reliable measure of experience, and that in the highest case we can make for art, we can argue that the experience of the work is its sought-after meaning. The angling questions explored here have less to do with the artwork and more to do with the artist’s primordial indulgences and retaliations. What sensory elements are prioritized in a traditional sight-based viewing of art, and what instincts of disembodiment, or stepping outside the flow of time, are beseeched?

Anju Dodiya’s shaped mattress and watercolour painting confront with an enigmatic female figure, bearing creative anxieties that find kinship in Ranbir Kaleka’s sculptural re-modelling of older video projects, some featuring himself; Sudhir Patwardhan and Gieve Patel’s paintings compose portraits of the psyche of other-hood and subjective perpetuations of community, a promised condition of living in reciprocal interaction; Atul Dodiya extrapolates on world discourse to present a series of gallows as arbitrary exclamation points in the disruptive continuum of art history; N.S. Harsha’s whimsical sculpture connects life experience to eternal myth, returning to the cosmos as a witness as well as an omniscient narrator; and Balkrishna Doshi reveals a transcription of memory, among several revisitations, in a pedestal sculpture that is poised in the quiet unravelling of an inner narrative. These works communicate presence and power in their storytelling, each presenting a subversive approach to beauty, discovered in the myth of the moment in which they were created. While the locus of creativity on display shifts in radius and magnitude, we must remain vigilant to a second-hand experience, of forethoughts now as afterthoughts, as these artworks settle in sensory stipulation and convey an aesthetic legacy that begins with the loss of a moment, captured vitally through a brushstroke, a pen, a carefully placed nail.

A Lick of Night in the Morning
GROUP SHOW
Curated by Dipti Anand
27 September – 28 October 2022
Vadehra Art Gallery
D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024 Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Artists: Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Balkrishna Doshi, Gieve Patel, N.S. Harsha, Sudhir Patwardhan and Ranbir Kaleka