Bengal Beyond Boundaries

Aakriti Art Gallery brings to Bikaner House, New Delhi a historical show of Great Masters of Bengal both past and present in an exhibition that straddles modern and contemporary Indian art. Curated by art critic and curator Uma Nair and conceptualized by legendary artist Jogen Chowdhury, the exhibition will have seminal works by Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Hemen Majumdar, Somnath Hore, Rabin Mondal, Ganesh Pyne, Arpita Singh, Jogen Chowdhury, Anjolie Ela Menon, Paresh Maity, and other important artists.
Aakriti Art Gallery seeks to place the history of the Bengal School as one that is born of the reflection of human understanding and affinity for a love of nature as well as the recording of human history through a fine selection of hand picked works.

The show will have paintings, drawings, prints, as well as sculptures. Arranged in chronology, the exhibition exemplifies the ingenuity as well as ethos of modern and contemporary art practices.

“This exhibition will be one of great history and depth, to understand the phases in Bengal art” says Vikram Bachhawat, director of one of Kolkata’s prestigious galleries known for its publication of art journals, as well as an inventory of a brilliant art collection.

“A rank of works that transcend time the images of human figures as well as expressionist works will reflect the incessant human desire to explore the macrocosmic and the microcosmic through the experience of memory as well as history. These works will offer many journeys of discovery and contemplation and signify the enduring need for artists to provide a context and commentary around artistic journeys,” says curator Uma Nair.

The hallmark of the show will be the coming together of many big names in the art fraternity who have been practitioners for decades to young new upcoming talents.

The artists, printmakers and sculptors have unravelled internal ‘journeys of discovery’ to  provide an insight that focuses on the finest details of communication as well as the contemplative idiom in the creation of their own art. The show will include a quest that reaches out to capture the known as well as the unknown, it blends into a narrative of a prism of social, cultural as well as a memoir of personal and public contemporary developments born out of the leaves of memory and Bengali heritage.

Divided into Bikaner House’s maze of galleries in the Centre for Contemporary Art, the expansive exhibition will feature the breadth of mediums artists worked within, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, and graphic works, as well as representations from  Aakriti Art Gallery’s  enormous archival collection built up over decades.

From the early Kalighat mythic moorings to contemporary character to the complexities of politics and power and faith and fervour this show is a novel look at present day practices in the light of the past. Not to be missed.

There will be a special interactive session on 8th July 2023 at the Bikaner House Ballroom for a specially invited guest list of eminent artists art historians and the art fraternity.