Yatra Naryasthu details the passion and devotion of a woman artist’s journey of creation, says Uma Nair
Yatra Naryasthu is a title that Adwaita Gadanayak, DG, NGMA, took from the Sanskrit shloka: Yatra naryastu pujyante ramante tatra devata, which means where women are worshipped, there the gods rejoice. A historic show gives us a glimpse into the tapestry of the life of several women artists. It straddles India’s greatest names like Zarina, Arpita Singh, Arpana Caur, Jayasri Burman, Anupam Sud, Soghra Khurasani, Jyotsna Bhatt, Dipali Daroz, Jayashree Chakravorty and many more. Created as a corollary among printmakers, sculptors, ceramic artists and painters, the show has something for everyone. Special is the requiem for artists who have passed away. A number of works have been specially loaned to the NGMA by eminent collectors from Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai.
Zarina’s My Delhi
Zarina passed away last year on April 20 in London. Poet, printmaker and teacher Zarina was born in Aligarh, India. After receiving a degree in Mathematics, she went on to study woodblock printing in Bangkok and Tokyo, and intaglio with SW Hayter at Atelier-17 in Paris.
Her experiences and personal life define Zarina’s works. An early interest in architecture and Mathematics is reflected in the use of geometry and her emphasis on structural purity. While her work gravitates towards minimalism, its starkness is tempered by its texture and materiality. Her art poignantly chronicles her life and features recurring themes of home, displacement, borders, journey and memory.
Zarina mined her memory and experience to reflect on the nature of belonging. Delhi 1, II & III, are three prints that address the theme of home within the context of individual and national identity, displacement, isolation and community. Yet when you look at them together, it’s like a meditation on belonging.
Manisha Bhattacharyya’s Song of the Sea
Ceramic artist and mentor Manisha Bhattacharyya passed away after a battle with cancer and her cluster of three raku pots belong to her series of the sea. Laden with crackled glaze and the sandy tone of a murky white, it shows her prowess and passion for creating pots that had a minimal accent and a Zen echo of rare rhythms.
Leena Batra’s porcelain platters
In the history of ceramics in India, former Garhi artist and co-founder of Delhi Blue Pottery, Leena Batra is an important name. Three porcelain platters are a treat for tired eyes. She was one of the first to experiment with porcelain and these three platters speak of precision, perfection and the finesse needed to create celadon glazed platters.
Madhuri Jalan’s Lingam
Madhuri Jalan was a ceramic artist. She used to create sculptural pots and among her experiments was a copper lingam that was a part of her show at Habitat Centre in 2010. This copper lingam with a small trunk of an elephant is on loan from a collector. As a work of art, it blends both mythic and spiritual yearnings in a deeply materialistic world. The lingam initiates an exchange of ideas/emotions around the thematics of the creative process, inviting the viewer to weigh in on deeper artistic sources and cognitive triggers that stir them to create.
Prabha Shah
At the Triveni studio creating canvases for more than two decades is abstractionist Prabha Shah, who creates work in silence because she can neither hear the world nor speak her heart out in syllables.
Prabha’s canvas is a testimony to the process of abstraction being an experience — not only is it the crux of creation but it is also a residue that evolves with both precision and fervour. Prabha’s visual language is the key to her own odyssey. In her canvas, the addition, the summation and the erasure all come into play. These postulations of personal choice become a paradigm of a self-referential and self-editing intention that is in parts voluntary and involuntary – as an act of creating in a silent world that has no sound.
Ultimately for art lovers Yatra Naryasthu details the passion and devotion of a woman’s journey of creation.
(The show is on till March 29 at NGMA.)