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June 2004 New York - On display at Bose Pacia Gallery through July 2004 is a group exhibition of art made by artists working within India as well as foreign artists who have visited and worked there. This eclectic array provides an opportunity to view brand new works by young artists as well as rare jewels by established masters.
Among the offerings that have been mixed together regardless of age or provenance are small works on paper by India's modernist masters
Ram Kinker Baij and
Ganesh Pyne; new large-scale works by Bombay contemporaries
Jitish Kallat and
Anju Dodiya; a suite of small paintings by
Manisha Parekh of New Delhi; and a painting mounted onto a brocade scroll by
Nilima Sheikh of Baroda (whose large commissioned work for the Asia Society in New York had been on view in their stairwell for the past two years).
In addition, works by a number of New York artists that have been created in India will be on view. Two groups of Aura Photographs by
Chrysanne Stathacos, the first of Tibetan monks shot in Dharamsala and the second of Hindu saddhus shot in Rishikesh and Vrindavan. Stathacos employs a bio-feedback camera to capture the luminescent colors which surround all human beings, in the process making a statement about the abstract equalities of all religious traditions.
Fullbright Scholar
Julie Evans presents a group of paintings created in New Delhi and Jaipur which fuse the miniature painting traditions of Rajasthan and the Himalayan foothills with modernist iconography and decorative sources both Eastern and Western.
Stephen Frailey, head of the photography department at the School of Visual Arts, is represented by four small gouache studies executed on top of typical framing pictures of Hindu deities. The result is a poetically abstracted reference to India, something neither painting, nor photograph, nor print.
Zarina Hashmi was born in Aligarh, India and has lived in New York for more than twenty years. Her two multiple-element sculptures are flexible, playful and tangentially evocative of South Asia.
Aditi Singh's delicate works on paper exploit a hesitancy of touch and subtle palettes. A young painter of Indian descent, her works can be said to illustrate the increasing hybridization of cultural references, evidence of the inappropriate attempts to locate images with specific nations.
With this mixing of artists from diverse generations and backgrounds and works in a wide variety of mediums and approaches, the exhibition hopes to question categories of artistic pedigree, the relationships between location and heritage with artistic production, and the desires (or lack thereof) for novelty within the art market. Much as the contemporary art of China has been scrutinized by the Western world in recent years, many international artists, curators and gallerists are beginning to focus on the contemporary art scene of India today. One is left to wonder exactly how does one define "Indian Contemporary Art"? By ethnicity of the artist, where the work was produced, by the languages it employs or by the traditions it identifies itself through?