The artists may be generations apart, yet two aspects conjoin them on a similar path. Each of these artists trace their origin to India while their creative pursuits have made
Paris their adopted home. Recently the work of 18 such artists collectively made it into an exhibition titled “Besides Paris” and the meeting point was Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata. The exhibition is spaced out on two floors and named “Sacred Modernities” and “Celestial Bodies”, perhaps to highlight and distinguish two different eras of creativity.
The first piece of work
that meets the eye is legendary painter Amrita Sher Gil’s painting Mother and Child. The attention is further drawn towards the works of veterans like S.H. Raza, Narayanan Akkitham, Sakti Burman, while on the other floor contemporary artists like Madhu Mangal
Basu, Nitin Shroff, Bhawani Katoch hold centre stage.
London-based curator Shaheen Merali comments, “From Sher Gil to the gamut of artists currently living and working in Paris — from the oldest arriving in the 1950’s to the more
recent adventurers, all have been moved by the magnetic pull of the grand city. Effectively they remain iconographers, touched by the cultural traits of the past and the current filters that we are learning to call cultural democratisation.” She further adds, “In this voluminous cultural development, where access, location and history have folded to create a particular language, participation creates the slight degeneration of traditional structures and hierarchies. We can ask now Besides Paris, why Paris? What are the set of references that are at play and how has the Indian artist fared in the modernist hub? Have all the signals and signs of French invention helped resolve intense queries of art histories, ghosts and nostalgic scapes? For these 18 artists, who live and work in Paris, perhaps this is not a second home for them, this is home.”
The paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs on display are underlined by their artistic brilliance. All the creations are wide and varied in style and medium as well as distinct in character and mood.
While the themes are diverse in their time and distance, the stories of the artists are no less intriguing either. For instance, artist Sharmila Roy describes her artistic pursuit while living abroad, as that “of a boat, navigating quests that gets lured by the calls of
distant shores, a poetical metaphor that one finds so very often in Rabindranath
Tagore’s songs and poems.”
And then there is artist Madhu Mangal Basu, who was earning his livelihood as a taxi driver in the late 1970s and trying hard to keep his passion for the arts alive, by squeezing time out from his grinding schedule to attend art college. That’s when a French woman walked into his life as a traveller looking to explore Kolkata. Somewhere during that journey, love happened. It’s this single incident that changed Madhu’s life forever and today, he is one of the best known Indian artists in Paris’ art circle. These are people who have emerged as an artistic connect between Paris and India, and their work is a brilliant amalgamation of two distinct cultures while the exhibition celebrated the point of convergence.