Art Expo

Art Expo 2009 brings together Indian contemporary masters and their diverse voices by mapping the confluence of visual languages that shape the present art scene. The show features works by prominent masters such as Akbar Padamsee, K.G.Subramanyan and Jogen Chowdhury with those of younger artists such as Jagannath Mohapatra, Alok Bal, Chirag Patel and Hrushikesh Biswal. Each artist showcases tradition as well as contemporaneity moulded by their own visions.

Padamsee’s metascapes, mirror images, and the figures and heads present his painterly explorations throughout his oeuvre. Whereas Subramanyan’s narrative inventiveness takes us back to traditional Indian folk and craft, emphasizing that modernism in Indian art is never a closed form. Similarly, Chowdhury successfully combines traditional imagery with contemporary painting. He blends urbane self-awareness with localized folk and mythical influence where his lines and figures are charged with both fragility and fierceness.

Shown alongside are the works from the next generation where, Mohapatra’s layered urban fables, Bal’s vibrant surfaces and idioms, Biswal’s innate savage stories of desire and Patel’s witty narrative style presents a new chapter in the Indian contemporary art scene. Their works display a rapidly transforming India where various themes are explored through observation and personal response.

Art Expo by gathering these practices under one roof exhibits various dialogues and resists linearity. It proudly showcases multiplicity of Indian contemporary art.