Understanding and admiring the works of a new generation
Contemporary art arrived in India three decades ago, but it has changed direction since the ’90s, when it found a global voice within a local context. A whole generation of artists has created a body of work that is markedly different from that of previous masters—works that need to be understood as much as they need to be admired.
The Burden Of The Body
A Balasubramaniam (b. 1971)
Gravity, 2006
Fibreglass and Acrylic
There could be something gruesome about A Balasubramaniam’s obsession with the body. Despite the wide spread of his art practice, the widely exhibited Bala—painter, sculptor, printmaker, installation artist—is best known for a body of work (pun intended) in which he literally casts himself, moulding fibreglass about his features so they take on his distinctive form. Yet, this preoccupation—the artist choosing to play hide and seek, as it were, with himself—is hardly narcissistic, thereby highlighting that which remains seen, and that which is hidden. In one interesting exhibition, you saw his back disappearing into the wall in one room, the front emerging from another wall in another room. The idea behind this leitmotif is to centre conversations around the body and its relationship with an increasingly material world—based on light, air and shadows—creating a gripping drama through a narrative that could be a fable of our times.
Hybrid Hedonism?
Bharti Kher (b. 1969)
Arione’s Sister, 2006
Mixed media
First glimpses can be misleading. What appears a figure of a fashion model morphs into a hybrid with equine legs (and presumably hooves) on closer viewing. This part-animal, part-human with a tonsured head, which seems straight out of a sci-fi feature, is characterised by the shopping bags that adorn her like wings, creating an almost-mythic creature as an ode to our material world. Bharti Kher, one of the more intellectual among the younger generation of Indian artists, is more associated with the use of bindis in profusion, responding thereby to issues of gender, fertility, inequality and class on one hand, and of anthropological and environmental concerns on the other. That the bindis are also decorative adds an aesthetic layer to this questioning. But in works such as these, the artist steps out of her groove to explore other interesting aspects, the investigation of which results in a visual language of staggering dimension and provocation.
(This story appears in the Sept-Oct 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)