
Amitava: Untitled, 1977
Amitava: Untitled, 1977
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is delighted to present two distinct artistic practices with pronounced styles and rich imagery, in the works of artists Amitava and Mohan Samant. The two exhibitions will stand independently while conversing with each other through cursors of art-making and ingenious journeys of the two artists. The practices of Mohan Samant (1924 – 2004) and Amitava (b.1947) speak of creative inclinations of two distinct generations. In terms of engagement with the material, both Amitava and Samant have displayed unquestioned mastery in their individual trajectories, which have resulted in the most astonishing emergence of forms and figurations on pictorial surfaces.
The exhibition If We Knew the Point - Amitava draws from an array of styles and references which are emerging points of Amitava ‘s images. Cruising between a wide range of mediums from graphite, ink, ballpoint pens, watercolour, and collages to making burnt marks on paper, he treats the illustrative ground through the poetics of materiality. Often unwilling to rationalize the meaning behind art making, he emphasises the statement that ‘art is to be experienced’ and not reasoned out.
Recalling Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetics In Search of Duende, and the related notions portrayed by Lorca as a forceful energy containing irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death, Amitava’s images flourish on the abstract edge of creative balance between visual art, music, cinema and poetry. The interplay of forms, from liminal figures of humans and animals, appropriations from nature to the geometrics of urbanity, populate a wide range of surfaces, from sketchbook papers, and canvases to handmade rice paper, that Amitava chooses.
With more than 150 artworks the exhibition will explore the diversity of forms, colours, textures, and surfaces that evoke a multitude of emotions. The exhibition title is both a somatic and rhetorical coinage, drawing from the eponymous poem by Roberto Juarroz. The term ‘point’ comprehends an array of meanings, on one hand, it means a particular fact, idea, or opinion that somebody expresses, or a primary piece of information, while it also means a statement or an objective.
Amitava: Untitled, 2006
On the other hand, ‘point’ or a dot is an essential unit of making art, which reminds us of a range of art terminologies from ‘pointillism’ (art movement) to the dots used in various indigenous art forms. Amitava uses these elements (dots or points) with precise objectives to impart definitive volume and impact in his forms. One finds thousands of these dots or points that make his images incisive, providing them with both formalistic and conceptual advantages. Filigree-like entwining, minimal geometric space formations are a few signifiers that mark his signature style. Speaking of poetry, and space making while involved in exhibition designing and his general inclination towards design elements, Amitava uses curious objects like price tags, bus tickets and other ephemera on the artworks as reminiscences of his travels, a mnemonic archive, and as take-off points for his imagination to excavate formalistic possibilities in his art.
The exhibition will unfold elements of surprise on display while unfolding Amitava’s varied and subtle interpretations of cultural stigmata which are interwoven within a collective cultural identity, something he has absorbed and released.
Mohan Samant: Black Magician, 1996
The second exhibition Magic in the Square - Mohan Samant, Centennial Exhibition, is a crisp exploration of Samant’s practice, which is also a tribute to the artist. Mohan Samant was part of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) and carried the dynamism of the spirit of that age. Unique in his approach, Samant’s practice stood apart from the stylistic language of the PAG peers. Samant is one of the modern Indian painters to be trained in India and become successful in the West following India’s independence. He has been dubbed as "one of the few artists who has successfully made the bridge between Eastern and Western traditions."
Having spent most of his life in New York, Samant’s practice is a classic instance of the strong ingrained roots to the homeland despite having migrated to a different hemisphere, amidst a different culture. Revisiting Mohan Samant while reading his unorthodox approach in transliterating through a set of personal iconographies that would indicate a less-spoken chapter in the national history of art. He was one of the earliest examples of a transcultural person, freed from the incapacitating logic of stylistic doctrine through which often the modernist-nationalist narrative is studied, as poignantly termed by Homi K. Bhabha, he was a dweller of the in-between.
Mohan Samant: Celebration of the Dead, 1987
Growing up in the vibrant city of Bombay (now Mumbai), Samant was exposed to the realism of reproduction of Ravi Varma’s paintings at a tender age alongside his mother’s efforts in the crafts. Later on, training at the JJ School of Arts, and tutelage under Shankar Balwant Palsikar, introduced him to indigenous art styles like Basholi which left an ineffaceable mark on his creative subconscious. Simultaneously the Abstract expressionism that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in New York, opened new approaches to experimenting with methods, language, scale and medium. Samant configured a style that incorporated and experimented with possibilities of materials, apart from regular paint he started using cement, plastic, sand, and thread, eventually layering his pictorial ground with cut-out forms and figurines. He raised these cut-outs from the primary surface, thus giving his paintings a three-dimensional effect. They are neither relief nor flat, this in-betweenness, perhaps is an adroit extension of his skills as a Sarangi player. The abstract nuance of classical music is translated in a subtle daintiness on his canvases.
The exhibition Magic in the Square is a nonliteral elucidation, drawn from the title of one of his artworks. With 20 works of Mohan Samant from the KNMA collection and other collections, synchronizing with the poetic deliberations of Amitava, the exhibition explores the ‘intermediary’ transmissions in consciousness that flow freely from one creative field to another, from poetry to image to music.
Words Platform Desk
Date 31.07.2024