The term and concept of modernism in art, especially Indian art, is interrogated by the curator Rajan Purohit in Home Alone: Modernist Visual Confirmations. The show brings the works of some well-known but mainly lesser known artists to the fore. The show explores the very individual and lonely pursuit of the art and honing of their craft by artists within the confines of their comfort zone of home and the studio,
Each artist in the show develops a private world of imagination through his work, through a strong stylistic response to his inner and outer world. What binds them together is the use of modernist language in their works that is apparent in the engagement with the world through illusion, disjuncture and distortion. The creation of a personal idiom based on style and thematic thus predicated on certain notions of what constitutes Modern for the producer and consumer of art.
Interestingly, within the modernist idiom one sees a preponderance of landscapes, physical and innerscapes, mainly executed in abstract and impressionistic styles. Landscapes, as a reflection not of nature but of society and lived environment, are experiencing a comeback after many years in the background, considered by many to be bordering on extinction in the era of digital and instant photography. However, as is obvious from many of the works in the show that painted environs engage with the self and consciousness at deeper levels than possible through a camera.
Ghazali Moinudddin uses thick impasto and bold strokes to create an impression of frozen topographies through the convergence of energies and elements in the centre of the canvas. There is a descent inherent in the work, but not like the rushing of river waters but more like the stately and orderly gradual march of a glacier.
On the other hand, Mahmood Ahmad celebrates colour through the flowers abstracted in horizontally arranged planes. Vimal Chand’s kikar forests and winding bridle paths provide a more naturalistic view of the countryside overridden by a distinctly pastoral vision. Agendas are concealed and ideologies sublimated in this vision of the idyllic world of nature.
— Dr Seema Bawa is an art historian, curator and critic