The exhibition explores memory, transformation and the collision of urban and personal spaces, says SAKSHI PRIYA
A walk through Magic Erase, the solo exhibition by Hemant Gavankar at Art Centrix Space, is like entering a layered palimpsest of time, space, and fleeting memory. Curated by Sibdas Sengupta and presented under the Art Centrix Painting Grant, the exhibition is an exploration of changing cityscapes and interior geographies, each frame marked by the rhythm of personal and urban transformation.
Gavankar, a visual artist and poet trained at Sir J. J. School of Art, presents his works as complex arrangements of memory, paintings that deliberately blur the boundaries of past and present, real and imagined. In works like Memories of Water and Glass and Blasting and Other Images 2, oil, charcoal, gouache, and pastels are used to great effect, juxtaposing fragments from different spatial and temporal planes.
One particularly striking piece, Inauguration of Modern Temple and Other Images, observes the collision of the sacred and the contemporary. A quadriptych on paper, it balances order and disarray, hinting at the strange dualities of belief and modern architecture. Similarly, Qasam’s Girni Grandmom’s Thumb and Land and its studies unfold like intimate visual journals, quiet and unsettling in equal measure. The sense of distance and emotional fragility is visible.
Gavankar brings abstraction into deeply personal. His layering of mediums mirrors the disorderly nature of memory — partial, unpredictable, and fragmented. Works like Memory of a Memory 3 and The Lost Room intensify this experience, presenting places that feel familiar yet unreachable - scenes glimpsed between waking and sleep.
There is an unmissable contemporary urgency in his interrogation of public, private, and digital spaces. The exhibition’s title, Magic Erase, points to both disappearance and transformation, a quiet erasure of lines, boundaries, and certainty. Artist art resists finality, inviting viewers to observe, interpret, and reimagine.
The art is bold, unafraid of ambiguity, and intellectually engaging. It challenges conventional visual comfort, yet it is precisely this discomfort that provokes reflection. It is the kind of art that grows on the viewer, revealing it slowly, and layer by deliberate layer. This is not an exhibition one walks away from; it unsettles and stays with you.
