At Akara Modern, two artists redraw the boundaries of modernism

There is a particular kind of intimacy that lingers in works gathered through friendship rather than acquisition. You sense it before you read the wall text, before you clock the dates or mediums. It hums somewhere between the surface and the story. The upcoming exhibition at Akara Modern, drawn from the Lechner Collection, leans into that hum, bringing together Jamini Roy and Meera Mukherjee in a conversation that feels less like a curatorial pairing and more like an overdue reunion.

Tracing fire through clay eyes

Both artists circle the same question from different decades. What does it mean to make something modern without severing it from where it comes from?

Jamini Roy answers with line and restraint. His figures carry the grammar of Kalighat painting and temple friezes, yet they refuse to sit obediently within history. They lean forward, eyes wide and almond-shaped, as though listening for something just beyond the frame. There is a kind of discipline in his work that borders on devotion. Every curve seems considered, every repetition deliberate. And yet the paintings never feel static. They flicker. They breathe. They hold within them the murmur of storytelling traditions that were never meant for silence.

Meera Mukherjee, working a generation later, approaches the same terrain with heat and heft. Her bronzes do not sit; they gather themselves. They tilt, bend, stretch, as though caught mid-thought or mid-song. If Jamini Roy’s lines suggest a kind of internal rhythm, Meera Mukherjee’s sculptures insist on the body. You can almost feel the pressure of fingers, the insistence of touch, the memory of molten metal cooling into form. Her engagement with lost wax casting is not nostalgic. It is investigative. She pushes at the edges of the technique, folding in what she has learnt from elsewhere, until the surface carries both inheritance and interruption.

Seen together, their works begin to behave like echoes across time. Jamini Roy’s flattened figures find a strange counterpart in Meera Mukherjee’s rounded forms. One pares down; the other builds up. Yet both arrive at a similar clarity. Neither is interested in spectacle. Instead, they seem preoccupied with something quieter but far more enduring: how gestures, rituals, and everyday labour can be translated into visual language without losing their pulse.

The Lechner Collection itself adds another layer to this dynamic. Formed in 1960s Kolkata through sustained relationships rather than transactional encounters, it carries the residue of conversations, studio visits, shared meals, and long afternoons. These are not works that travelled alone. They arrived with context, with stories, with the kind of trust that resists easy display. To encounter them now, in a white-walled gallery in Mumbai, is to sense that earlier world pressing gently against the present.

Akara Modern’s decision to stage this exhibition now feels pointed. Contemporary art, increasingly global and frictionless, often moves at a pace that flattens difference into style. Against that backdrop, Jamini Roy and Meera Mukherjee feel almost stubborn. They insist on specificity. They insist on locality. They insist that looking back is not an act of retreat but a method of propulsion.

And yet, this is not a show about nostalgia. There is no soft-focus reverence here. If anything, the works sharpen as they age. Jamini Roy’s paintings, with their distilled forms, read today like a refusal of excess. Meera Mukherjee’s sculptures, textured and insistent, feel newly urgent in their attention to labour and the human body. Together, they suggest that modernism in India did not emerge as a clean break from tradition but as a series of negotiations, revisions, and returns.

Walking through the exhibition, you begin to notice how often the idea of the ‘everyday’ surfaces. A mother and child. A dancer mid-step. A seated figure at rest. These are not grand subjects. They do not demand awe. Instead, they ask for recognition. They ask the viewer to slow down, to meet them halfway, to acknowledge the dignity embedded in ordinary gestures.

Perhaps that is where the exhibition lands most forcefully. In a moment when scale and spectacle dominate the art world’s imagination, these works draw attention back to something more elemental. A line. A form. A gesture carried across time.

What Roy sketches, Meera Mukherjee casts. What Meera Mukherjee solidifies, Jamini Roy lets drift. Between them, a bridge forms. Not fixed, not final, but alive enough to walk across.

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