Sarala’s Art Centre celebrates six decades with Garden of Memories exhibition

When Soli and Moti Daruwala opened Sarala’s Art Centre in Chennai in 1965, they were doing something that had no real precedent in South India. There was no market to speak of, no collector base, and no cultural shorthand for what a contemporary art gallery even was. What there was, apparently, was a lot of art college students with nowhere to go. The gallery became their place.

The latest exhibition reflects on 60 years of Indian art legacy

Six decades later, Sarala’s Art Centre, now widely recognised as the oldest gallery in South India dedicated to modern and contemporary Indian art, has worked with names like MF Husain, Ram Kumar, KCS Paniker, and Akbar Padamsee. Its international arm, Artworld, has taken Indian art to Germany, Japan, Singapore, the US, and beyond. And this month, it pauses to look back—with Garden of Memories. Presented by Vimonisha, the exhibition features over 150 works drawn from six decades of relationships, conversations, and a whole lot of trust.

Sarala Daruwala Banerjee, who runs the gallery alongside her husband Bishwajit and their daughters Shavira and Anahita, is refreshingly honest about how she got here. “I personally didn’t follow, I just fell into it,” she says with a laugh. Her husband, she explains, had the keener eye. But what Sarala brought was something else: a lifetime of knowing the artists personally, having grown up around them since she was a toddler.

And that relationship will be evident in Garden of Memories. The artists represented span the country and the decades— painters, printmakers, and sculptors working across traditions and techniques, many of them now considered legends of the Indian art world. Some are no longer living. “But there is a lot of personal stake in it. There are a lot of stories in our minds about each artist and the artworks displayed,” Sarala says.

The show isn’t built around a theme or a tight curatorial argument, and Sarala is quite deliberate about that. “It’s pretty much a non-curated show, I would say. We are just touching upon memories of different artists we worked with.” With 150-plus works and counting, she admits they’re not even showing half the artists the gallery has represented over the years. “The list is so endless that we are not able to do justice to it in one go. You can expect more parts to it,” she concludes.

Open to all. On March 8 (5.30 pm to 7.30 pm) and 9 (11 am to 7 pm).At Lalit Kala Akademi, Thousand Lights, Chennai.

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