Masters and modern artists featured in hybrid exhibition

Some works by classic and contemporary artists are on simultaneous display at a physical gallery and on Google Arts and Culture

'Lady with the violin' by Raja Ravi Varma.

A portraitby C RajaRaja Varma.

(For box) ‘Immortal: Selfless in A Selfish World’ by actor Salman Khan.

A Bengaluru arts foundation is using a Google platform to display its two decades of work online.

The Sandeep and Gitanjali Maini Foundation has put up a few select works from its latest show, ‘The Masters and the Modern,’ on a platform called Google Arts and Culture.

The exhibition is on physical display at Gallery G till March 10. The foundation first mooted the idea of going with Google Arts and Culture (GAC) to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012.

Later, founder-trustee Gitanjali Maini recommended it to Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, based in Bengaluru. “During this five-year-long association with the GAC team, we have had conversations about documenting our foundation’s works. We started working on the project in May 2020 and have been live online since February 26 this year,” she says. Moving art to different places has always been a challenge, especially when they are “national treasures and registered antiquities”.

A platform like GAC automatically opens things up to a global audience, Gitanjali says. The show brings together old and new works, and includes masterpieces by Raja Ravi Varma, C Raja Raja Varma, Sekhara Warrier, Neelakanta Pillai, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Jamini Roy.

Salman Khan as painter

The showstopper for the current exhibition is a painting by Bollywood actor Salman Khan, titled ‘Immortal: Selfless in A Selfish World’. “He doesn’t want to be in the commercial space. We are trying to help him by putting his works in prominent museums in the country. This is the first showcase of his work – we selected it because the stroke was good. In the limited range, he brings out Mother Teresa really well,” says Gitanjali Maini.Gitanjali has selected two Salman Khan works for GAC. A work called ‘1964’, which she has chosen, is an image of his parents in the year they got married.“It is difficult to distinguish between the man and the woman, but he’s added a ‘bindi’ for the distinction,” she says.

Gallery G rules

Entry is by appointment for groups. Not more than 10 people are allowed at a time.

What is GAC?

Google Arts and Culture (GAC) is an online platform to showcase high-resolution images and videos of artworks. The platform includes guided tours, 360° videos and educational tools. If you take a selfie, the GAC app can match it with an old museum portrait from the Google database.