Adwaita Gadanayak’s Chehre focusses on an artist’s individualistic creativity over academic style. By Uma Nair
An array of sculptural heads at the NGMA Delhi make manifest what it feels like to be a human being and how sculptors can create heads that echo realistic idioms as they translate human characteristics in materials to reflect the veritable essence of existence. Culling a show from the NGMA Archives is what director general Adwaita Gadanayak has been doing ever since he took over three years ago. In scouring the archives Gadanayak unveils how artists introduced methods and techniques that are central to his own artistic aesthetics.
Gadanayak states: “The art of modern portraiture in sculpture can be seen majorly from the colonial times, but with this exhibition a focus is drawn on the individualistic creativity of the artists rather than a particular academic style. Chehre is about discovering India’s talent in modern cultural trends. The NGMA Archives is full of a number of works that present art history in many shades. I want the art world and art lovers to know and recognise our history and its depth of creativity. Chehre shows various phases of this form of creative expression rendered in stone, wood, metal and other experimental mediums.”
Among the 50 heads on display it is vital to zoom in on a quartet that form the genesis of Indian contemporary art history.
Ramkinkar Baij -Abanindranath Tagore
The pioneer of modern sculpture in India Ramkinkar Baij’s portrait of Abanindranath Tagore is worthy of scrutiny. Abanindranath was a founder of the Bengal School of Art. Here the portrait has about it a rough hewn pinched panache. Rustic rhythms seem evocative as well as expressively elegant. Baij obviously created his cast with his penchant for moulding and you can see the signature of honesty and translation of characteristic features with consummate ease. Modelling the features of ears and the hair with a naturality was Baij’s brilliance.This head becomes the edifice on which we can begin understanding the evolution of works in this finely curated show by Adwaita Gadanayak and his curatorial team.
Himmat Shah -Dead Metallic
The second work that you must hunt out is Himmat Shah’s organic tenor terracotta work entitled Dead Metallic. Himmat’s birth in 1933 in Lothal, near Saurashtra, one of the sites of the Indus Valley civilisation where several pre-historic artefacts have been excavated becomes an important detail to understand his felicity with terracotta. It is the archetypal aura, the radical emotive moulding of the streamlined head that draws attention. Historians have noted that Himmat used self-designed tools and innovative techniques, to create sculptures that spoke of a unique yet rare contemporary edge.
Working with slip-casting, and accepting the tenors and travails of firing, Himmat’s head accentuates the tactile qualities of the surface smoothness. His recurring theme in terracotta has been the monolith head that takes on the form of an iconic object, a ritual symbol or an ancestral memory. The erect form of the head here exudes a subliminal signature containing an aura of spiritual energy, perhaps of a tirthankara, or a guardian spirit as we espie its early birth.
Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee’s sculptural head is a delight to behold. “Expression is all the more powerful when it is about a solitary figure,” said Padamsee in a recent interview to Christie's and it is so true when you look at his work in this archival collection. Padamsee created masks of beaten copper as far back as 1955. This bronze belonging to 1985 has about it an orientation of universality about it. He has often said that he sees art as an innate logic. This head testifies to that vision.
“I feel that art always belongs to the present in a living culture, even if its actual making dates back to 10,000 years. Great works of art usually carry within them an intuitive, innate logic. I do not subscribe to the notion of art as self expression. Rather it is this intuitive logic which is expressed through form, colour, line, sound, formulae — proportion, the tension between spaces, their interrelationship, all this have their own internal logic,” stated Padamsee in 1953 and these words help us understand his creative surges. Sculpted first in clay, then cast in plaster of Paris and wax —after the age old cire-perdue process, cast finally in bronze, this tip tilted head is stoic and holds a dignity as it exudes an inherent, compacted strength. “We are a presence, the here and the now. All that matters is that we have to deepen our existence,” he stated and this holds true.
Biman Das
Sculptor Biman Das’s 1976 composition of a double head has about it a deep aura of invincible intensity as it veers into abstraction and simple sophistication. There are a range of responses that arise when we look at this iconic work . We can think of man and woman, sharing everything so much so that their spirit of being is conjoined and in symphony. Ranging from the dense, and the vivid, to a monochromatic mooring with distinct tonalities it offers a spectrum of references. Smooth contours and lithe lines speak of a deepened intuitive understanding of human features.
The planar lines with a seemingly simple finesse of the fingers and economy of execution, capture the intrinsic grace of the human face while we can also spend time analysing its very catalyst of construction. Creating a composition with long, lithe and slender lines is what makes this work stand apart. At best it speaks to us about inferences and imageries that are remote, timeless and mysterious. “I learnt how to play with abstraction in my friendship with Dhanraj Bhagat,” says Biman Das. “Sculpture for me was about finding new journeys, and simplifying forms. While I was rooted to Indian traditions and cultural symbolism my forms were born out of abstracted sensibility which I believe is Indian. If you look at the old Kali temples and see the level of abstraction you understand that abstraction was part of the Hindu identity,” says Das who gets ready for a historic Retrospective at AIFACS in February 2018.
(Chehre runs at NGMA Delhi through October and November 2018.)