Art challenges are a great way to get better or obtain experience outside of one’s comfort zone if one is new to the medium, or to experiment beyond one’s chosen genre. To allow artists to express themselves freely, the Icon Art Gallery’s eponymous art challenge, consciously did not designate a subject. The resulting paintings are now showcased at the gallery’s group exhibit. Offering an art collective of 34 artists from across the country — Vimal Marroju, Rupali Das and Ramesh Nair, to name a few — the show manifests their everyday creative process.
“My focus has been to encourage emerging artists. During the pandemic, the art scene looked very scattered with no activities – everyone was completely segregated and disconnected. Art grows with practice; when it stops, stagnancy that seeps in is beyond repair,” says Avani Rao Gandra, the gallery’s curator, who is also a practising artist. “I wanted the challenge to become something through which artists can inspire one another,” she adds.
Avani conceived the idea of a 30-day art challenge with the registered participants sharing their ‘backstage’ or ‘unwitnessed’ process of the final illustrations. “It can be a quick sketch, part of a bigger work – just sharing what goes behind the finished artwork. I formed a group on WhatsApp and in three to four days, participating artists were finishing at least one artwork. The completed pieces were then shared on the gallery’s social media,” Avani tells us.
In this art challenge, from November 25 to December 25, all the artists manifested their creations which accounted for an aesthetic journey to remember. They shared their familiar artistic methods, ideas, and processes over the course of a month to make the process of indulging in art all the more immersive and engaging. “The interaction among the artists was intimate in which they got to share a lot about their creative processes with each other,” she says, adding, “The artists also explored several mediums like woodcuts, postcards, ceramics, acrylic, oils – to elevate their abstract, contemporary and modern art expeditions.”
Exhibition on till January 20. At Banjara Hills.
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