Dipping into the colour of infinity

An ongoing exhibition in Delhi has 19 artists exploring their individual engagement with Prussian Blue. The uniqueness of the colour is relatively unknown, as is its link with science and its role in transforming the course of art. It was by accident that two German alchemists discovered Prussian Blue in a Berlin laboratory. Thus, the world’s first synthetic pigment was born, and it became an instant sensation. Many artists turned to Prussian Blue, including Pablo Picasso whose work between 1901 and 1904 is called his ‘Blue Period’. With this exhibition, curator Dr Arshiya Lokhandwala pays a subliminal tribute to her late father who manufactured paints, Prussian Blue being his favourite. Researching the colour deeply, she was amazed at its historical significance and realised there was no large-scale exhibition that explored its historicity. So, she reached out to artists who immediately responded to the challenge of thinking through the colour.

The exhibition showcases a diverse array of art forms, encompassing painting, sculpture as well as video and installation art. As the works came together, the artists had to decide how they tied into their larger practice. “The expansive and diverse use of media allowed the artists to find their own trajectory, and unpack the colour, politicising it in their own manner through its materiality,” explained Lokhandwala.

For Alke Reeh, the universal symbolism of the colour blue coincides to a large extent with that of a dome. “Blue, the colour of the sky as well as water —  both infinite —  is equated with eternity. Thus, the colour became a tribute to many deities,” said Reeh. In ‘Sea-wind Of The Night’, Anju Dodiya uses Hokusai’s image of The Great Wave to represent the onslaught of time. The painting on the left shows the silhouette of an unknown woman with a crashing wave. The image on the right confronts the Prussian blue in a dynamic blur of wind. “The foam of the wave has claws, but the girl has wings, and heroic intentions,” said Dodiya.

With ‘In The Self Of Mind’, Astha Butail examines the relationship between the mind and the self. For her, the mind is a complex system of myriad thoughts, imaginings and processes, which she explores as an abstraction through 189 hexagonal frames on the ceiling. It alludes to an open book in continuation with her earlier body of work ‘A Story Within A Story’. Desmond Lazaro’s series of paintings gathers work from the initial inquiry into cosmology to more recent studies examining the fundamental equations of astrophysics. “The issue of what we look at and interpret pales in comparison to who or what is doing the looking. And yet we must examine both in equal measure,” he said.

Mithu Sen’s exploration delves into cognitive illusions and paradoxical perceptions associated with colour, rejecting visually perceived images that deviate from objective reality. N S Harsha’s painting presents a flipped reality, with bold hand or finger marks left around the central figure as a metaphor for a ‘physical’ material search in the dark. Parul Gupta’s Interplay series uses a cyanotype printing process of chemical application, exposure under UV light and washing off the paper with water.

Prajakta Potnis’ lightbox ‘Capsule 2’ is a photograph of a constructed landscape shot in a temperature-controlled environment of a refrigerator. Her works attempt to echo a sense of a tipping point of no return, of fading landscapes and toxic residues. “The cold blue light within the three installations plays an active agent in subliminally evoking a sense of alienness and anxiety,” Potnis elaborated.

Since 2008, Shilpa Gupta has been working on her project of 100 hand-drawn maps of India. In them, she explores a sense of belonging to the nation-state and the process of remembering it by inviting 100 people to draw a map of their country. Created by using stamps, a material which dates back to her art school days, the artist subverts the process of record keeping. “The map lines ebb and flow into each other like water. They are never identical, sometimes similar and sometimes quite different,” said Gupta.

Subodh Gupta’s blue painting ‘My Village’ hopes to convey the nostalgia, memory, desires and struggles surrounding the stories he heard while growing up. “Many things remind me of my village, but at the same time, when I think about my village, my town, where I come from, I think about the socio-economic, political, and ecological ways my upbringing has shaped me,” he said. Sumakshi Singh’s series ‘Light Song’ uses light as both a subject matter and key material ingredient which creates images or blueprints of itself. Images of light rays coming in through windowpanes register a pattern of light and shadow on the wall and floor as if someone has stitched them together.

The exhibition, ‘Prussian Blue: A Serendipitous Colour that Altered the Trajectory of Art’ at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida, concludes today.