<p>This year’s (2016) overall quality of art on show was somewhat better than in the past,” observed John Elliott in his blog, Riding the Elephant. “But there was little on show that was specially original or memorable, with few eye-catching installations, though the spacious layout of booths in large exhibition tents on the Okhla site was an enormous improvement on previous years.”<br /><br /></p>.<p>The British journalist, based in Delhi, was assessing the eighth edition of India Art Fair (January 28-31, 2016), which had the participation of about 70 national and international galleries. Coinciding with the fair, the capital played host to some interesting collateral events, including a major retrospective of Himmat Shah, curated by Roobina Karode at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (January 28-July 20, 2016). Titled ‘Hammer on the Square’, the exhibition presented around 300 works executed by the 83-year- old veteran artist over a long and distinguished career. Along with his celebrated terracotta sculptures, the show also included a range of bronzes, drawings, high-relief murals and burnt paper collages. <br /><br />Later in the year, KNMA presented the first ever retrospective of Jeram Patel (1930-2016), titled ‘The Dark Loam: Between Memory and Membrane’ (August 23-December 20, 2016).<br /><br />You can’t please all<br /><br />Among the big-ticket shows abroad, the one that received a substantial amount of media attention was the retrospective of Indian modernist painter, Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). Titled ‘You Can’t Please All’, the exhibition at London’s Tate Modern (June 1-November 6, 2016) was the first posthumous survey of Khakhar’s work, bringing together his art from across five decades and from collections around the world. <br /><br />The show received positive reviews, including one from Mark Hudson of The Telegraph, who gave a four-star rating and called it ‘extraordinarily absorbing’. Novelist, critic, professor at the University of East Anglia, Amit Chaudhuri published a long essay (Bombay dreams: how painter Bhupen Khakhar captured the city spirit) in The Guardian. <br /><br />Ten days later, however, the same newspaper carried a rather critical piece by Jonathan Jones (Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook), which stirred the proverbial hornet’s nest. Giving one-star rating for the show, he also made some stinging remarks on Khakhar (“an old-fashioned, second-rate artist… incredibly unimpressive Indian painter”) and his work (“There is no self-knowing game or provocative crassness going on in his brightly-coloured but emotionally inert paintings. He is genuinely just not much good.”) <br /><br />Many artists and writers in India were outraged by Jones’s review. “The critic’s eyes are dull, his judgment embarrassing (imagine invoking Beryl Cook, OBE) and his language vulgar — he relies on alliterative adjectives that are mostly expletives,” responded art critic, historian and curator Geeta Kapur (The Wire). After Tate, the Bhupen Khakhar exhibition moved to Germany for a showing at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin (November 18, 2016, through March 5, 2017).<br /><br />By the way, on November 22, 2016, Khakhar’s 1979 painting titled ‘Man in Pub’ sold for £263,000 (approximately Rs 2.24 crore) becoming one of the top five works by the artist to be ever sold at auction. The square format (122 cm x 122 cm) oil on canvas painting showed the protagonist perched on a lean bar stool set against a blue backdrop and was presented at the sale of Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art by Bonhams in London. <br /><br />There were some other interesting results in art auctions during the year. On October 18, F N Souza’s 1963 painting titled ‘The Deposition’ (oil on canvas/138 x 170.5 cm) sold for £1.57 million (Rs 12.78 crore), including buyer’s premium at Sotheby’s London. In the same auction, Vasudeo Gaitonde’s untitled 1973 oil on canvas went for £965,000 (Rs 7.88 crore). The two paintings were made by the artists at the peak of their careers in London and Delhi, respectively. <br /><br />Earlier, on September 8, a new world record price for Akbar Padamsee was set when his 4.3 x 12 foot canvas titled ‘Greek Landscape’ sold for a whopping Rs.19.19 crore at Saffronart’s auction. The event (which also saw a Gaitonde painting getting Rs 10.12 crore) achieved a total sale value of Rs 68.55 crore.<br /><br />Biennale by the sea<br /><br />At the time of writing this piece, the third edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 (KMB) entitled ‘Forming in the pupil of an eye’ was all set to open at multiple venues in and around Fort Kochi. “The Kochi-Muziris Biennale creates a space for cross-cultural interactions — something that is a fundamental aspect of Kochi’s historical and mythical identity — and can also be viewed as a means of connecting the past and the present, without looking at them in binaries,” explained Sudarshan Shetty, curator of the event. <br /><br />With a large grouping of nearly 100 national and international artists, poets, and musicians presenting their works and performances, KMB 2016 (December 12, 2016-March 29, 2017) has raised hopes of maintaining its pre-eminent position in the art world. <br /><br />The departed<br /><br />2016 has been a year of mourning with some of the leading lights of Indian art bidding goodbye. The list included Jeram Patel (died January 18, 2016/ 86 years/ Vadodara); Rajan Krishnan (d. February 11/ 48 years/ Iringalakkuda near Thrissur ); A A Raiba (d. April 15/ 93 years/ Nalasopara, Mumbai); K G Subramanyan (d. June 29/ 91 years/ Vadodara); Sayed Haider Raza (d. July 23/ 94 years/ New Delhi); C Dakshinamoorthy (d. September 23/ 73 years/ Chennai); Yusuf Arakkal (d. October 21/ 71 years/ Bengaluru); Pradeep Nerurkar (d. October 11/ 59 years/ Mumbai); and Suhas Roy (d. October 18/ 80 years/ Kolkata).<br /><br />Raza, a member of the Progressive Artists Group founded in 1947 in Bombay, was an influential figure on modern painting, while Patel was one of the pioneers of abstract art in India. Often described as the last Renaissance polymath among the modernists of India, Subramanyan became known not only as an artist but also as a writer, teacher, and outstanding scholar. Roy’s countless images of the romanticised female face and form had made him a household name in West Bengal.<br /><br />Arakkal, who was born in Kerala, spent most of his life in Bengaluru immersing himself in painting and sculpting. Krishnan, the young artist with a progressive bent of mind, was known for his inexhaustible interest in nature, which he portrayed in his large and colourful canvases. Nerurkar, a self-taught artist with a deep interest in zen/taoist philosophy, conveyed his feelings through abstract paintings; while Dakshinamoorthy, a prominent member of the Madras Art Movement, was a prolific sculptor who modelled his work by closely watching people’s moods, postures and gestures. Raiba, an early member of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, sadly spent most of his final years ignored and impoverished in a small flat in Nalasopara, on the outskirts of Mumbai. <br /><br />The year also witnessed the closure of Gallery Maskara in Mumbai. In its decade-long existence, the gallery had earned a reputation as one of the city’s premier contemporary art exhibition centres.</p>
<p>This year’s (2016) overall quality of art on show was somewhat better than in the past,” observed John Elliott in his blog, Riding the Elephant. “But there was little on show that was specially original or memorable, with few eye-catching installations, though the spacious layout of booths in large exhibition tents on the Okhla site was an enormous improvement on previous years.”<br /><br /></p>.<p>The British journalist, based in Delhi, was assessing the eighth edition of India Art Fair (January 28-31, 2016), which had the participation of about 70 national and international galleries. Coinciding with the fair, the capital played host to some interesting collateral events, including a major retrospective of Himmat Shah, curated by Roobina Karode at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (January 28-July 20, 2016). Titled ‘Hammer on the Square’, the exhibition presented around 300 works executed by the 83-year- old veteran artist over a long and distinguished career. Along with his celebrated terracotta sculptures, the show also included a range of bronzes, drawings, high-relief murals and burnt paper collages. <br /><br />Later in the year, KNMA presented the first ever retrospective of Jeram Patel (1930-2016), titled ‘The Dark Loam: Between Memory and Membrane’ (August 23-December 20, 2016).<br /><br />You can’t please all<br /><br />Among the big-ticket shows abroad, the one that received a substantial amount of media attention was the retrospective of Indian modernist painter, Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). Titled ‘You Can’t Please All’, the exhibition at London’s Tate Modern (June 1-November 6, 2016) was the first posthumous survey of Khakhar’s work, bringing together his art from across five decades and from collections around the world. <br /><br />The show received positive reviews, including one from Mark Hudson of The Telegraph, who gave a four-star rating and called it ‘extraordinarily absorbing’. Novelist, critic, professor at the University of East Anglia, Amit Chaudhuri published a long essay (Bombay dreams: how painter Bhupen Khakhar captured the city spirit) in The Guardian. <br /><br />Ten days later, however, the same newspaper carried a rather critical piece by Jonathan Jones (Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook), which stirred the proverbial hornet’s nest. Giving one-star rating for the show, he also made some stinging remarks on Khakhar (“an old-fashioned, second-rate artist… incredibly unimpressive Indian painter”) and his work (“There is no self-knowing game or provocative crassness going on in his brightly-coloured but emotionally inert paintings. He is genuinely just not much good.”) <br /><br />Many artists and writers in India were outraged by Jones’s review. “The critic’s eyes are dull, his judgment embarrassing (imagine invoking Beryl Cook, OBE) and his language vulgar — he relies on alliterative adjectives that are mostly expletives,” responded art critic, historian and curator Geeta Kapur (The Wire). After Tate, the Bhupen Khakhar exhibition moved to Germany for a showing at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin (November 18, 2016, through March 5, 2017).<br /><br />By the way, on November 22, 2016, Khakhar’s 1979 painting titled ‘Man in Pub’ sold for £263,000 (approximately Rs 2.24 crore) becoming one of the top five works by the artist to be ever sold at auction. The square format (122 cm x 122 cm) oil on canvas painting showed the protagonist perched on a lean bar stool set against a blue backdrop and was presented at the sale of Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art by Bonhams in London. <br /><br />There were some other interesting results in art auctions during the year. On October 18, F N Souza’s 1963 painting titled ‘The Deposition’ (oil on canvas/138 x 170.5 cm) sold for £1.57 million (Rs 12.78 crore), including buyer’s premium at Sotheby’s London. In the same auction, Vasudeo Gaitonde’s untitled 1973 oil on canvas went for £965,000 (Rs 7.88 crore). The two paintings were made by the artists at the peak of their careers in London and Delhi, respectively. <br /><br />Earlier, on September 8, a new world record price for Akbar Padamsee was set when his 4.3 x 12 foot canvas titled ‘Greek Landscape’ sold for a whopping Rs.19.19 crore at Saffronart’s auction. The event (which also saw a Gaitonde painting getting Rs 10.12 crore) achieved a total sale value of Rs 68.55 crore.<br /><br />Biennale by the sea<br /><br />At the time of writing this piece, the third edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 (KMB) entitled ‘Forming in the pupil of an eye’ was all set to open at multiple venues in and around Fort Kochi. “The Kochi-Muziris Biennale creates a space for cross-cultural interactions — something that is a fundamental aspect of Kochi’s historical and mythical identity — and can also be viewed as a means of connecting the past and the present, without looking at them in binaries,” explained Sudarshan Shetty, curator of the event. <br /><br />With a large grouping of nearly 100 national and international artists, poets, and musicians presenting their works and performances, KMB 2016 (December 12, 2016-March 29, 2017) has raised hopes of maintaining its pre-eminent position in the art world. <br /><br />The departed<br /><br />2016 has been a year of mourning with some of the leading lights of Indian art bidding goodbye. The list included Jeram Patel (died January 18, 2016/ 86 years/ Vadodara); Rajan Krishnan (d. February 11/ 48 years/ Iringalakkuda near Thrissur ); A A Raiba (d. April 15/ 93 years/ Nalasopara, Mumbai); K G Subramanyan (d. June 29/ 91 years/ Vadodara); Sayed Haider Raza (d. July 23/ 94 years/ New Delhi); C Dakshinamoorthy (d. September 23/ 73 years/ Chennai); Yusuf Arakkal (d. October 21/ 71 years/ Bengaluru); Pradeep Nerurkar (d. October 11/ 59 years/ Mumbai); and Suhas Roy (d. October 18/ 80 years/ Kolkata).<br /><br />Raza, a member of the Progressive Artists Group founded in 1947 in Bombay, was an influential figure on modern painting, while Patel was one of the pioneers of abstract art in India. Often described as the last Renaissance polymath among the modernists of India, Subramanyan became known not only as an artist but also as a writer, teacher, and outstanding scholar. Roy’s countless images of the romanticised female face and form had made him a household name in West Bengal.<br /><br />Arakkal, who was born in Kerala, spent most of his life in Bengaluru immersing himself in painting and sculpting. Krishnan, the young artist with a progressive bent of mind, was known for his inexhaustible interest in nature, which he portrayed in his large and colourful canvases. Nerurkar, a self-taught artist with a deep interest in zen/taoist philosophy, conveyed his feelings through abstract paintings; while Dakshinamoorthy, a prominent member of the Madras Art Movement, was a prolific sculptor who modelled his work by closely watching people’s moods, postures and gestures. Raiba, an early member of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, sadly spent most of his final years ignored and impoverished in a small flat in Nalasopara, on the outskirts of Mumbai. <br /><br />The year also witnessed the closure of Gallery Maskara in Mumbai. In its decade-long existence, the gallery had earned a reputation as one of the city’s premier contemporary art exhibition centres.</p>
