AN ART WEEKEND IN MUMBAI PART II
The ninth edition of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend (MGW) focuses on design and accessible art. Our second section of insights.
In our second installment that looks at the Mumbai Art Week, we notice an interesting trend of design and art coming together on the same platform and merging the divides. For instance, Atelier, a pivot facilitating the protraction of Ashiesh Shah’s architectural studio, was born from a vision to blur the boundaries between art and design in 2017. ‘OTLO,’ is a Gujarati word for threshold, and it draws from the commonalities of form and function to present their ‘heirlooms of the future’. Inspired by the Japanese philosophy of ‘Wabi-Sabi,’ these design objects follow a ‘Brutalist Tribal’ characteristic to celebrate beauty in imperfection through a series of handcrafted collectibles.
For their first presentation, Ashiesh Shah has set forth with his caravan of concepts, steering towards the old Indigo Bungalow – an architecturally prominent landmark amidst the chaos and cacophony of Colaba Causeway, in search of a new avatar, soon to be redesigned as One8 Bungalow.The exhibition has opened and is displaying its collection from noon to 8 pm the night till the 20th January, 2021.
Bringing art to the café culture, Art and Charlie are proud to present Tasawuur, a solo show by Sajid Wajid Shaikh, at Kuckeliku café. The gallery team fell in love with the café’s commitment to create an experiential space that allows its guests to take in a bite of culture along with their coffee and croissant.
Their endeavor is to bring carefully selected artists to their viewers, in a space that attempts to bring art into the everyday.Sajid is a multidisciplinary artist from Mumbai.He experiments with shape, color and line to produce bespoke illustration, pattern design, portraiture and typography. He takes inspiration from Music and Fine Art to create unique works, which fuse traditional drawing techniques with digital technology. The collection will be on display till 31st March 2021 at their flagship partner venue Kuckeliku Breakfast House, Colaba.
Another wing of art and design may be viewed at Obverse: Rooshad Shroff and Tanya Goel. Their exhibit is primarily a collection of Marble Lights that launched in early 2020 but never before exhibited in Mumbai due to the circumstances surrounding the lockdown last year. Blocks of white Makrana marble have been hollowed out into individual bulbs and tubes, with either a smooth or carved finish worked on by Jaipur artisans. The flexibility of design allows each piece to cater to a specific requirement, metamorphosing from hanging pendants to desk lights and table lamps. A set of new shades has also been added to the collection for the Mumbai Gallery Weekend.
Moving on to painting is Music Modern, the first viewing of a solo show by the artist Naval Jijina where he proposes a lifetime of works that intertwine painting colour with classical Indian music. Jijina, a recluse Parsi abstractionist in Mumbai, who with his ‘Aerial Views’ is not painting abstract landscapes atop of an airplane. Rather his aerial visions arise from a play in colour. Learning under Shankar Palsikar who intertwined Paul Klee with the tenets of Indic Mythology and miniature painting challenging the colonial curriculum at the Sir JJ School of Art in the years of India’s nascent independence, Jijina joined a select group of artists such as Syed Haider Raza, Vasudeo Gaitonde and other abstractionists from the Bombay School of arts in experimenting with colour.
For this edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend, Art Musings presents Reincarnate: We meet here in the Afterlife, a solo exhibition showcasing works by contemporary artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, featuring painting, sculpture as well as a series of poetic love letters. Suleman is an award-winning diaspora artist whose work is at the intersection of magical realism, art, technology and social justice. Her work weaves together the sensual and sacred, past and future; through paintings, wearable sculptures, and interactive installations and public art interventions.
Proximate Paths at Akar Art Gallery presents the works of two very important artists of the 1970s and ‘80s. Known as a golden generation of figurative painters that grew to maturity in India, Bhupen Khakhar and Jogen Chowdhury established themselves among the preeminent artistic voices to find full expression in that era. Chowdhury was raised in a region of Bengal that became part of East Pakistan, Khakhar on the western coast, and their artistic beginnings were as far apart as that physical separation. Khakhar was entranced by the gaudiness of the street, its shrines, shops and banter. Chowdhury excelled within an academic framework, creating intense studies and introspective self-portraits, of which one of the latter finds place in the show. Khakhar, operating in a gentler mode, crafted beguiling portraits of tradespersons like barbers, tailors and watch repairers. The two artists were drawn into a larger movement towards politically engaged forms of narrative figuration, demarcated in Geeta Kapur’s catalogue essay accompanying the text.
Mumbai Art Room and Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery present This Boat with a Broken Rim supported by the Inlaks India Foundation. Taking helm of our now nomadic space, for this season of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, is Phalguni Guliani who brings together artists from across international geographies, diverse mediums, and varying stages of practice – each of whom addresses the fragmented realities of border regimes and arbitrary assemblages, as experienced by both body and object as it passes through time.
While Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Sudipta Das, Salik Ansari and Chinar Shah all speak in a voice that is distinctly their own, they are united in their clarion call for imagining a world that can exist without such restrictions.
Also featured is Jamaat Art Gallery, showcasing the works of Lekha Washington, Gallery Isa featuring the works of Antonio Santin for a solo titled Gravitas.
Priyasri Art Gallery featuring Abhishek Salve, Kumar Misal and Roshan Anvekar.
Pundole is showcasing a selection of the Moderns, while Sakshi Art Gallery’s exhibition Tinker Tailor, Soldier Sailor features artists Manjunath Kamath, Rekha Rodwittiya, Begum Lipi, Remen Chopra W. Van Der Vaart, among others.
Mumbai Art Room is a nomadic curatorial lab that aims to become the space where the next generation of curators from India and internationally can be mentored, nurtured, and supported at critical points in their career to grow as exhibition makers.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images courtesy all the galleries represented by Mumbai Art Room
https://www.pundoleartgallery.in/
