Painting India’s evolving cultural legacy
A nation carrying centuries of cultural history often struggles to figure out exactly how to handle it. Do we lock it behind glass, or do we let contemporary hands pull it apart and put it back together? Curator Priyanka Banerjee firmly chooses the latter. With ‘Panorama 24’ at the India Habitat Centre’s Visual Art Gallery, she places our massive cultural legacy right next to fresh contemporary ideas. Rather than forcing a strict topic onto the walls, the collection draws its energy from letting wildly different styles clash and complement each other.
You feel this immediately when looking at Amit Kumar’s watercolours. Entirely self-taught, Kumar turns his brush to the fragile elegance of bone china and blue pottery, forcing the viewer to find absolute magic in ordinary domestic objects. The crisp blue motifs sitting against pristine white porcelain are executed with such extreme precision that the flat paper seems to hold physical weight.
A few steps away, Anindita Kishore shifts the room’s temperature with Memories of Spring. Operating on the belief that art should fundamentally bring joy into a living space, her canvas pays an eccentric, beautiful tribute to the unseen labourers she watched tending the gardens at Rashtrapati Bhavan. She paints her subjects with blossoms literally bursting from their fingertips, a clever visual trick that turns hard physical work into an act of literal magic.
Then, Purnendu Mandal cracks the gallery open with raw energy. Tackling Varanasi, a city painted entirely too often, he manages to find a fresh angle. Abandoning strict architectural realism, Mandal applies thick layers of colour with a palette knife. His aggressive, loose strokes capture the heavy, chaotic atmosphere of the holy ghats rather than their exact geography.
The exhibition proves that our artistic legacy is no fragile relic. In the hands of these creators, it remains a loud, constantly evolving conversation.
