Interacting with artists to know about their artworks is a part of any art exhibition. But what if an art show also opens the door for you to master the skill of critical art writing? In a unique art education programme, Visual Arts Gallery brings to the capital a workshop cum exhibition that will not only give art lovers a chance to view the artworks of seven reputed British artists, but will also provide an opportunity to art writers to participate in a two-day lecture and seminar-based workshop conducted by Dr Grant Pooke, senior lecturer in the School of Arts, University of Kent, UK.
While Dr Pooke will introduce and explore the principles of authoring clear and direct copy for art reviews and art criticism, Angus Pryor, senior lecturer and director, School of Arts, Medway, University of Kent, will curate the exhibition, Critical Narratives in Colour and Form, which will run parallel to Dr Pooke’s workshop. On display will be the works of Pryor himself, Mavernie Cunningham, Jez Giddings, William Henry, Mark Howland, Chris Hunt and Aya Mouri. While the entry to the exhibition is free, the workshop, which will be held at the Visual Arts Gallery on November 30 and December 1 from 10 am to 6 pm, can be attended for a fee of `1,500 for members of the India Habitat Centre and `2,000 for non-members.
“Both the visual art exhibition curated by Pryor and the critical writing workshop devised by Dr Pooke is very much part of my deep commitment to arts and education. Critical writing is an extremely relevant and much needed requirement both for the understanding and dissemination of contemporary visual art practice in India,” says Dr Alka Pande, director, Visual Arts Gallery. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to the influential approaches to art writing, including the formalist-based perspectives developed by Clement Greenberg, one of the greatest art critics of modern times.“Critical Narratives in Colour and Form aims to explore how a range of British artists continue to re-fashion their practice in relation to aspects of narrative and biographical storytelling — traditions which remain prominent within aspects of contemporary practice by some artists in India,” says Dr Pooke.
The exhibition, which will open on November 27 and conclude on November 30, mediates a shared engagement with the idioms of modernism, abstraction and figuration, with particular reference to examples of contemporary painting and printmaking. While many of its contributors, either as artistic practitioners, writers or academics, have affiliations with educational institutions in Kent and the locality of southeast UK, the show attempts a broader exploration of how received and inherited ideas, forms and narratives have been hybridised and developed in the UK and elsewhere. This process has been principally undertaken by a new generation of what might be termed “post-conceptual” practitioners — those typically born in the 1960s and 1970s.
The focus on painting and printmaking is also intended to help address, at least in small part, a critical tendency to favour other genres of art, like installation, conceptual art, photography, land and film-based practice. “Critical Narratives places a deliberate emphasis on painting and printmaking — essentially wall-based, two dimensional practice. Although storytelling as a distinct, narrative tradition is well established within and across the visual and religious cultures of India, it has often been pictorially lost within more recent British practice. One of the aspirations behind this selection of work is to suggest a modest contribution towards re-establishing the viability of this tradition,” says Pryor.