By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS
New Delhi : Meet India’s first artist duo of Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, aged 30 and 28 respectively. The communication designers with black spectacles, nerdish faces and little goatees paint the angst and aspirations of Punjabi youth hooked to fake designer labels and a passage to “Amreeca”.
In November, T&T, as they are monikered, converted a gallery in New Delhi into a “departmental store selling fake goods” for their art exhibition.
The Gurgaon-based designers told IANS they are now innovating on their pet peeve – Bosedk – a kind of Anglo-Punjabi slang that the artists have coined to mock their “traditional elders”. Bosedk, chorus Thukral and Tagra, is a series of paintings, installations and computer graphics.
Indian contemporary art is changing. The widespread use of technology, coupled with a fresh burst of creativity, exposure to new knowledge pools and cultural assimilation, has fuelled a new wave in Indian art. It reflects the emerging identity of a globalised India.
New York-based French diplomat Jerome Neutres, an Indophile and art researcher who has edited the country’s first volume on contemporary art, told IANS: “The new artistic wave is marked by maturity, wisdom, freshness of the youngest nation in the league of global superpowers.”
His book “New Delhi New Wave”, which features 14 contemporary artists, hit selected stands in the country Saturday.
“New Delhi New Wave”, unlike the name suggests, is about artists from diverse corners of India. Each one of them has been captured in their studio – from Gurgaon on the outskirts of the national capital to Vishakapatnam down south – and given a geographical perspective through photographs of the milieu they work in. They all have one thing in common – they are the first generation of globalised artists from India who are carrying forward the country’s rich tradition of figurative art in their own creative ways.
Ravinder Reddy, born in Suryapet in Andhra Pradesh and based in Vishakapatnam, sculpts female icons of Indian deities. He kneads them in clay and pours them into resin or less frequently in bronze casts and paints them red, yellow and blue.
The artist, a lecturer at the Vizag Art Institute for the last 17 years, has created a foundry in the woods and a studio in the town. Reddy travels the world through his art.
“This place is perfect for working. No one comes to see you, no one disturbs,” says the sculptor.
Baba Anand, who has elevated poster making to a highly evolved collage art through his embellishment of Bollywood movie posters, feels that in another 10 years there will be no galleries.
“Only the artist and the Internet. Art can be transacted online,” Anand told IANS.
The Gurgaon-based artist, who showcases his work on a 3-D virtual portal on the Internet will build his e-studio in “six months”. The new-age “innovator” as he is dubbed, repaints and embellishes Bollywood posters with “bric a backs like sequins, lost and found objects, beads, tinsel and crystals.” His “remixes” of the posters of Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan’s blockbusters and Raja Ravi Verma oleographs are widely acclaimed.
Subodh Gupta, a 43-year-old artist from Bihar’s Khagaul district, is obsessed with kitchens.
“Since childhood, I have been in love with the kitchen. It was a kind of place of worship… spiritual. Eighty percent of Indian kitchen utensils are made of stainless steel. The metal is contradictory. It attracts light, shines and is deeply associated with popular culture. That is why I have been working with stainless steel for the past nine years,” says Gupta.
He also experiments with buckets, canes, dishes, helmets, country-made guns, and cow dung at times in his installations, paintings and video art.
“New Delhi New Wave”, says author and art critic Diego Strazzer, has been culled from a recent exhibition of contemporary Indian art of the same name at the Marella Gallery in Milan, Italy.
“It is a continuation of the 672-page volume on contemporary Indian art ‘Made by Indians’ published by Enrico Navarra Gallery,” says Strazzer.
For Neutres, who toured India for 1,500 days to put the artists in their milieu and became a “complete Indian” in the process, the book is a tribute to his “adopted country and the GenNext of Indian art”.