Over 250 young, upcoming and popular artists will be showing their artwork at Artists’ Centre 16th annual show, which started on July 12 in Mumbai. And moving away from the traditional setup that the gallery has been following for the last 16 years, this year it’s not just art that will take centre stage, but there will be music (sufi and Bollywood) and workshops on various art forms by noted artists like Achyut Palav, etc to attract visitors.
The gallery has also stayed away from giving artists a theme to work on. Instead the show has been divided in two parts based on the surface — paper and canvas — which the participating artists chose to work on and categorised by the size (18inchX18 inch and 24X24 inch) of the final artwork. The first part of the annual show that opened on July 12 will commence on July 20 with 41 selected works on paper featuring artists like Amisha Mehta and Ami Patel.The second part from July 22 to 30, will feature works on canvas by young as well as popular artists like Brinda Miller, Prtihvi Soni, Madhusudhan Kumar among others.
The changes says, Amisha, who’s also a part of the gallery’s committee, were incorporated to make the show more organised. “Earlier works would come in different sizes. Some artists would send miniature works while some would send extra large canvases. It was all haywire. There was never a symmetry in the show, despite having a universal theme to it. And that’s why we decided to allow artworks in two fixed sizes,” she says.
Dr Sarayu Doshi, trustee, Artists’ Centre says that while limiting the size of the artwork has helped them organised it in a better way, it has also helped in bringing fresh set of works and ensure greater quality control. “Usually, we have artists exhibiting works which they have already completed some time ago. But we didn’t want that. We wanted them to create something new especially for this show,” said Dr Doshi.
And while limiting the size has given it a neat look, an absence of theme has helped in giving artists a freedom to express their creativity. “Last year we realised that with a pre-decided theme, we are actually limiting the creativity of the participating artists. Every artist has a different style, they like to do things on their way. This practice was restricting in some ways. We needed to free them from that,” she added.
A main aim of the show, says chaiperson, Brinda Miller, is to give young and upcoming artists a chance to display their work, while creating a forum where they can meet and interact with young and established artists alike. But they didn’t want the interactions to take place in a dull and boring environment, and that’s why they incorporated live workshops, musical evenings, lectures on art related subjects and tehatreical performances. The show has experts like Achyut Palav, Himanshu Seth, Sunita Bhuyan, Ananta Mandal, Prof. Vivek Dhar presenting workshops on subjects like calligraphy, photography, water colour painting, enamel demonstration etc.
“The idea behind the workshops and the stage performances is to make this art event more interesting and interactive. We basically want artists and art buffs to mingle with each other and enjoy themselves,” said Miller.