Using images of aircraft and winged creatures to convey her experience of fleeting moments, Kahini Arte-Merchant threw questions at the viewer while seeking answers to the complexities of modern life. Layering colour upon flat colour in meditative mode, she seemed to be in search of a spiritual balance even as her paintings struck a visual balance.

A multitude of mixed media creations were on view this festive season…. Maria Louis examines the varied offerings.

VERVE CLOSE-UP

Akbar Padamsee

Pundole Art Gallery

At 76, this stalwart of Contemporary Indian art continues to steer his very individualistic course along life's learning curves. Having observed, absorbed, experimented and translated his vision through mediums as varied as oil on canvas, Chinese ink-and-brush, animation films, print-making, metal sculpture and computer graphics, Akbar Padamsee began 2004 with a retrospective and ended it with an exhibition of recent drawings, watercolours and photographs. Fascinated by the unique character invested in each face, he has rendered heads in graphite, ink and watercolour. Unafraid to acknowledge that his role is merely that of a spectator when he photographs his "nude, not naked" models, he insists that in photography his subjects imprint themselves on the surface of the paper. Since he has used photography as a "means to an end" through years of drawing and painting figures, heads and nudes, it was interesting to see both cause and effect side by side for the first time. Spectator he may be - but consummate artist that he is, Padamsee's work persuades the most passive audience into active participation. He coaxes us to celebrate the form of the human body by feasting on his photographs.

Kahini Arte-Merchant

Jehangir Art Gallery

Here is one artist who displays commendable maturity with each consecutive exhibition. From the pretty self-portraits she indulged in during her formative years, Kahini Arte-Merchant has come a long way indeed! Like she announced through her last solo show held in December 2001, there is a continuing Metamorphosis in her persona. Transience, her latest series of 21 paintings done in acrylic on canvas, marked the culmination of years of studying human nature and filtering her thoughts, emotions and vision in her work. Using the vocabulary of contemporary imagery drawn from issues of cloning, dream sequences and the realm of magic, she communicated the transient nature of time, seasons and life itself. Using images of aircraft (Transience I and II) and winged creatures (A Dream Revisited I and Metaphysical Journeys II) to convey her experience of fleeting moments, she threw questions at the viewer while seeking answers to the complexities of modern life. Layering colour upon flat colour in meditative mode, she seemed to be in search of a spiritual balance even as her paintings struck a visual balance.

Dhruvi Acharya

Gallery Chemould

Who cannot identify with the twin tugs of family and work? Or the quarrels between one's emotional and intellectual selves? These universal feelings and experiences rooted in her particular circumstances of being a young mother of two precocious boys and an artist who divides her time between New York and Mumbai, blossomed into Figment, a collection of acrylic paintings by Dhruvi Acharya. The sudden evaporation of the creative spirit was palpable in the blank canvas of Paint, and the occasional relieving of pressure by letting off steam, was tangible in the picturesque cloudburst of Outburst. What was endearing about these perambulations of pigment was the gentle irony and undercurrent of laughter that coloured the artist's self-analytical canvases. As artist, Jitish Kallat, wrote in the catalogue: "Delivered through calculated doses of the burlesque, the grotesque and the arabesque, these are stories of each human being caught between the daydream of hope and the nightmare of reality."

VERVE VANTAGE VIEW

The Fine Art of Design

There is just a fine line between art and design. The Art Show held at Tranceforme, the design studio at Mahalakshmi, brought together four renowned artists. Anupama Kundoo, an award-winning architect who works out of Kolam (an architectural unit in Auroville), created a collection of granite pieces that retain their boulder-like forms while being transformed into usable furniture. Each one a sculpture by itself, the range covered coffee-tables, dining-tables, baithaks and urlis. Master ceramicist, Jyotsna Bhatt's vases, platters and animal forms are all set to become collector's items for their forms and glazes. Art jeweller, Usha Shah, designed handmade jewellery, with natural stones and antique glass beads. And artist, Sheetal Gattani, explored the square in her unusual sculptural lights that displayed her mastery over textures.

Then, the newly-opened Gallery Art & Soul at Worli previewed a collection of classic furniture bearing the signature style of various contemporary Indian artists. Titled Objets d'Art, the exhibition showcased the functional art of Suhas Bahulkar, Vilas Shinde, Jinsook Shinde, Brinda Miller, Gurucharan Singh, Anjana Mehra, Papri Bose-Mehta, Samir Mondal, Jyotee Kolte, and Bharti Kapadia, Anil Naik, Sudarshan Shetty, Arzan Khambatta and Sanjay Sawant, amongst others.

The way trends are moving, if you're looking for art, you should be checking whether you're sitting or sleeping on it, storing your belongings in it or eating off it!

The Fine Art of Photography

The line between photography and art is already so blurred, that photographs often share wall space with paintings. Blurred Borders, a Fine Art Photography exhibition held in association with Hacienda Gallery, celebrated this changing face of art. Linked by the common thread of an immigrant background that finds home in Australia, it included two painters and seven photographers among the group of Sydney-based student artists from the University of New South Wales. Their work displayed a multicultural aspect, as the artists hail from varied cultural backgrounds. Printing, photography, digital imagery and other new media were used to describe and depict the topography, life, culture and strife in the new homeland. Their stories of finding and making a new home were universal in appeal and provided a glimpse of the migrants' predicament of adoption and yearning. Indeed, this exhibition redefined notions of a fixed border - both culturally and aesthetically.

Pure photography, like art, captures moments of truth - as in Banaras and its People: A City that is a World, an exhibition of photographs by Chaitanya Patel at the Centre for Photography as an Art Form, NCPA. An emotional and spiritual response to the essence of a place that "vibrates with truth", his photographs strike a chord, irrespective of our cultural diversities and religious differences.

VERVE LISTING

• After four years, fans of Subhash Awchat, were treated to a completely new series of paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery. In Gold, the Inner Light, Awchat used symbols like Om and calligraphy from ancient religious texts to convey the energy and sounds that spring from the human body.
• The Bombay Boys were seen in Delhi last month, when Palette Art Gallery exhibited the work of artists, Anant Joshi, Baiju Parthan, Bose Krishnamachari, Chintan Upadhyay, Justin Ponmany, Jyothi Basu, Riyaz Komu, Sanjeev Sonpimpare, Sudarshan Shetty, Sunil Gawde, Sunil Padwal and TV Santosh.
• Fragments, a collection of recent paintings by Vijaya Kalyan at the Museum Gallery, was remarkable for the fabric-like texture conjured up by means of pigment and pattern.
• Attached Wings, the solo exhibition of Assam-based Ashim Purkayastha at Sakshi Gallery, used original revenue and postage stamps to depict the displacement and dislocation associated with the experience of being a migrant.
• Touch Wood, the paintings on wood done by Shailesh Acharekar, stood out at The Art Walk at Showcase 2004, the annual show presented by the Indian Institute of Interior Designers.
• Still Waters Run Deep, a group show portraying the richness of the difficult medium of watercolours, was conceived by art writer, Jasmine Shah Varma. On view at the Hacienda Gallery, Kala Ghoda, till January 13, it featured abstract, figurative, landscape and still life paintings by practising artists - besides works by some of the late masters of the medium such as K H Ara, Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij.

Look Out For

A Probing Within

She has always been inspired by the compulsion of probing the 'being within' and Whisperings of the Psyche, her new exhibition at the Hacienda Art Gallery, Mumbai, in February, speaks about identity and finding larger spaces within oneself. She artistically interprets the process of amalgamating this into our daily lives.

Papri Bose-Mehta started painting at the tender age of two, when most kids have not yet grasped a pencil. She interprets emotions and impulses, creativity and its expression, through the act of painting. Her images are fragile and in a state of transience, mirroring the consciousness or psyche that is found within. The poignant images about innner shifts will touch a chord…as always.

Meeting of masterminds

Anticipations, the landmark exhibition presented by Usha Mirchandani of The Fine Art Resource and her daughter, Ranjana Steinruecke, represented the best work of five generations of contemporary Indian artists. Running concurrently at two of Mumbai's prominent art venues, Jehangir Art Gallery and The Museum Gallery, the mélange of traditional and avant-garde works illustrated the variety that adds colour and spice to the art movement in post-Independence India.

Undoubtedly, the freedom of expression that pervades the art scene has created a fertile soil that is hospitable to divergent views, styles and directions…and even sustains the cross-pollination of ideas between generations separated only by years. This was beautifully captured in the latest work of senior, well-entrenched artists like M.F. Husain and Akbar Padamsee, whose age does not deter them from trying out new media. Displayed alongside were the paintings of the much younger, but already established, Atul Dodiya and Chittrovanu Majumdar; and the even younger, but prodigiously talented, Jitish Kallat and Bose Krishnamachari. No ordinary group show, Anticipations was a lesson in the evolution of contemporary Indian art, showcasing as it does the different possible artistic responses to varied influences across generations of post-Independence Indian artists.