By IANS,
New Delhi : The Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s apex body of art, will give out awards to 10 young contemporary artists at its annual national exhibition beginning in Chennai Aug 27, a senior Akademi official said.
The exhibition of contemporary art at the regional centre of the Akademi in Chennai will feature works by 117 emerging artists. It will be inaugurated by Tamil Nadu Governor Surjit Singh Barnala Aug 27, Akademi secretary Sudhakar Sharma said.
The focus of the exhibition is contemporary art and the awards will help contemporary art across all mediums explore more creative territories, Sharma said.
The award carries a purse of Rs.1 lakh and a plaque.
The prize winners include Gayatri Apte (Delhi), Arvind Patel (Gujarat), Neeraj Ahirwar (Madhya Pradesh), S.K. Sreenivasan (Chennai), Rajesh Pratap Srivastava (Kolkata), S.G. Maurya (Uttar Pradesh), Bibhuti Sharma (New Delhi), Mohan Dattatreya Shindne (Nasik) and J. Saigal (Delhi).
“The works for the exhibition and the awards were selected by a two-tier jury. An initial jury comprising Prabhakar Kolte, Jai Jarotia, Hanuman Kamble, Jaikrishnan Agrawal and A. Viswam selected 117 artists from a list of 8,000 submissions. A separate jury comprising Vijay Bagodi, Prem Singh, Pankaj Pawar, Anandmay Banerjee and Anil Kumar shortslisted the 10 young artists for the award,” Sharma told IANS.
“We rotate the exhibition for the local artistic fraternity to see the works. Last year, we held it in Kolkata. The works are usually cutting-edge and creative. And the award goes a log way in furthering the careers of budding artists,” Sharma said.
The works incorporated a range of influences and genres in figurative studies, abstraction, nature scapes, neo-miniatures, sculptures, new media work and even ceramics, the LKA official said.