Emami Art presents Bengal in new light at New Delhi for India Art Fair 2018

The fair highlights their new curatorial approach which focuses on contemporary practitioners from the region and elsewhere in India.
Emami Art presents Bengal in new light at New Delhi for India Art Fair 2018

Emami Art, formerly known as Emami Chisel Art (ECA), part of the reputed Emami Group of Companies, is proud to return to India Art Fair in the Galleries section for the upcoming edition, due to take place from 9 - 12 February 2018.

The booth display at the fair has been conceptualised by Anupa Mehta, curatorial advisor to the gallery, along with Richa Agarwal, CEO Emami Art. It highlights their new curatorial approach which focuses on contemporary practitioners from the region and elsewhere in India.

A selection of artists will be showcased, including Anwar Chitrakar, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Jamini Roy, Jayashree Chakravarty and Jogen Chowdhury. Traditional and contemporary works will sit side by side exemplifying Emami Art’s renewed thrust towards promoting the best of Indian Modern and Contemporary art practice. It is a precursor to the gallery’s new programming approach, which will come into effect post the opening of it’s strikingly designed new art space in Kolkata, to be launched later in the year.

The inclusion of Jamini Roy’s Crucifixion is an important marker, representing traditional as well as painterly departures that have shaped modernist practices in the region. Displayed alongside a suite of delightful contemporary pat paintings by award winning master craftsman, Anwar Chitrakar, the work highlights the legacy and richness of traditional idioms from where contemporary practitioners continue to draw inspiration.

Jogen Chowdhury’s quirky crosshatch drawings capture human nature and its foibles in an inimitable style.  At once urbane and resplendent with identifiable local Bengali flavor, they reveal the artist’s deep affection for his cultural background. "My background is relevant," he once remarked in an interview, explaining that his life in Calcutta was "quite disturbed with political movements. I paint also the Bengali business class worshipping the icon, and their corruption, how they degenerate just like the flesh."

In contrast, the works of Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Jayashree Chakravarty (recently did a solo show at Musée Guimet, Paris) display more eclectic international influences. Building from an abstract expressionist vocabulary, (although he prefers not to be slotted in any genre), Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s works are to be experienced rather than seen, given their affinity for cross disciplinary borrowings and the theatrical. He will be  showing an enormous metal construct, a multimedia installation which combines technology and imagery to highlight the material qualities of its medium.

Jayashree Chakravarty, who lives and works between Kolkata and Paris, has acknowledged the influence of French impressionism and Byzantine mosaic design, among other ideas, on her work, She avers that her works are immensely personal and intimate. Yet her quest is to transform these experiences into universal, even metaphysical, truths via her paintings and drawings which verge on abstraction.

The display at the Emami booth has been tightly curated, and offers a carefully considered attempt to present art from the region in a new light, drawing attention to the exceptional idioms of its most eminent contemporary practitioners.

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