6 to see: contemporary art in Mumbai
This retrospective at Chatterjee and Lal shines a light on one of the most significant artist-designers of India’s modernist design renaissance, featuring furnishings, clothing, photographs and calligraphy paintings. The show’s curator, Santiniketan-based scholar Ushmita Sahar, believes that even though the artist worked and exhibited prolifically both nationally and internationally during his lifetime, his immense legacy remains largely forgotten today.
In special exhibition at Famous Studios, Nature Morte and Chemould Prescott Road came together to present two major new works by this acclaimed artist. The first, Covering Letter, was a photographic-and-sound installation based on the time capsules launched into space by NASA in the last 70s. The second, Ellipsis, was a 60-foot-long painting filled with scattered images evoking the environmental, geological and celestial. In his explorations of otherworldly existence, the artist raises questions about humanity, and the things that unite and divide us.
Several new works by the Delhi-based artist are on display at Jhaveri Contemporary, including ‘The Sound of Water’, in which Parekh uses glue and graphite on paper to create an effect of dissolving bodies; and ‘Following You’, a series of wall-mounted metal sculptures. The exhibition reflects the artist’s interest in lines and their ability to bind as well as open, and in liquid as a metaphor for experience, desire and creation.
In this exhibition at Akara Art, the Rajasthani-born artist’s geometric paintings present landscapes of time and light. On the one hand, they explore the precision of geometry, and its ability to point human beings towards a complex future; on the other, its eroticism, and the bodily experience of being lured into a labyrinthine world of shapes and figures.
For the inaugural exhibition in its new space, Galerie ISA presents works by artist couple Idris Khan and Annie Morris whose fascination with colour is presented through several different mediums. Khan’s series of photographic prints and wall-mounted reliefs use the intensity of the colour blue in order to create and play with narratives. Morris’ stack sculptures of variously sized vividly coloured balls are the artist’s decidedly feminine take on a phallic totem.
A series of 10 works by Malani are on display at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, exploring subjects like oppression, dominance, freedom and justice, through immersive installations, wall drawings, animation chambers and video/shadow plays. By the same title as the exhibition itself, ‘The Witness’ is a triptych that employs the reverse painting technique and presents a future dystopia of contentious borders and sectarian conflict.
