Curator Neeraj Gupta brings forth a show of sculptures and paintings for public spaces. By Uma Nair
To serve public awareness for the arts and provide opportunity to artists to widen their web of influence in the market that is, at the moment, regressive and stagnating, curator Neeraj Gupta, president of the Delhi Art Society, brings forth a show of sculptures and paintings for public space.
Public art spaces
Public Art includes about 17 artists who are seasoned sculptors as well as painters.
Neeraj Gupta’s elephant flits through time and tide, raising questions and inviting introspections that waft through our everyday idioms and practices. While Anjali Khosa Kaul creates a synergy of sorts with her series that depict forest botanical creations in wood, Bhola Kumar’s stone creation has about it a stealthy gravitas as it’s about dimensions and depth. Brajesh Verman explores history and time with a work that goes down into the roots of Sumerian culture to give us words that are integral to sovereignty — strength, courage, freedom and eminence —and echoes of antiquity.
Nature and the human form
Arun Pandit’s Couple is influenced by Rodin and Brancusi. His Patina creates a rooted synergy of sorts as it speaks about the beauty of bronze and the pathos of life and its many learnings. Bhaktibhushan De’s Nature’s Sorrow is an evocative work that talks to man about nature’s strength and its eternal quality of recycling. It also talks about the harmony that man needs because it has been destroyed by man’s greed.
Madhab Das creates the most enduring form of the human figure. Here, man is lost, deprived and full of despair. Kavita Nayyar’s terracotta works are symbolic of her love for nature. Her prowess as an artist of measure and substance is seen in detail.
Simran KS Lamba’s Trees created out of tree trunk and copper give us tenets of man and nature and the unerring power of trees. He OR IS IT SHE brings back the words of Hermann Hesse who said, “Trees are sanctuaries.†Rajesh Sharma creates an emblematic symbol of man with his sculpture that is made of steel circular rods. It presents man in a dual setting who is balancing different things. Uttam Pacharne’s brass piece echoes the emblematic essence of nature.
Evocative paintings
Kalicharan Gupta, the abstract maestro of Delhi, creates paintings that spell the quasi realistic language of the dispersion and scattering of light and colour fields. He brings alive both modernist and impressionist moods.
Sangeeta Gupta, the poet, thinker and abstractionist, creates a set of platters that she paints upon with acrylic to create a conversation.
Ranjeeta Kant’s painting speaks about the universal debacle of infanticide. Within the realism of the human failing, here, we see the poignancy of the miracle of life and the suggestion of beauty of living rather than death.
The multi-faceted Naresh Kapuria, who has worked with so many media, creates a stirring amalgamation of composition, contours and colour facets with his work that straddles many scenes and times as it oscillates through the pendulum of time.
Artist Prem Singh creates paintings that celebrate the lyrics of spring in an impressionist manner evoking the magic of hillsides and flowers blooming in spring.
The most important facet of this exhibition is to lend a thought for art that must travel through time and be made visible to an audience. The most important part of an artist’s creation is the end result when the work is gazed upon by thousands. Public art for a city is about history, memory, metaphors and moods and it enlivens art practices and lasts long.
(The show is on till February 17 at Visual Arts Gallery, IHC.
