Art expresses freedom of mankind. It is a celebration of the freedom. too. It is with this view that the Stainless Art Gallery has showcased A 100 Many-Splendoured Things, a vast spectrum of 100 works by eminent as well as young artists. Paintings, sculptures, etchings, prints and modern forms such as installations and digital art are a prt of the exhibition.
This creative melange intends to underline the ‘new art experience’ that has emerged in Indian art in recent times. Hence, there is a vast bouquet of senior artists who have contributed to Indian art in a significant way as well as members of later generation who have created a niche for themselves in the art world.
It is interesting to note the way the works here deal with ideas of tradition and modernity. While working in the ‘modern’ and ‘global’ idioms of the day with utmost ease, most artists seem quite aware of their tradition, their ‘rootedness’ in their original landscapes and have made very meaningful use of being in the two worlds.
This has beautifully resulted in various transformations and transfiguration in most of the creations and it is remarkable to see how the tradition and the nativity meet the modernity and post-modernity, how the ‘local’ conjures up with the ‘global’ and what dimensions are thereby explored. This show also explicitly expresses the fusion of what is called Indian and Western in the artistic creations.
Interestingly, most of the works show that the uniqueness of contemporary Indian art lies in the fact that in spite of it being an integral part of the global art world, it has the strength of turning the colloquial and native experiences into universal ones.
The works represented in this show conjure up a world in them and communicate something unique and authentic in different modes. Some of them express the interiors as well as exteriors of our times while others speak of the ‘imagined’ and ‘conceived’ realities. Yet some tend to reflect just themselves which is of course considered to be one of the prominent aim of art.
These self-contained worlds also provide a panorama of what is best in the contemporary Indian art and what makes it so exciting and vibrant in the big and international world. They await the viewer’s eye to be seen and felt. As the India-born celebrated sculptor Anish Kapoor has finely put it, “There is something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.”