Amid Mumbai’s vibrant art culture and wide variety of art exhibitions, curators Ritu Chopra and Vikas Singh of Tela Art Gallery are all set to present ‘Up Next: A New Wave of Contemporary Art’, this September.
The exhibition will bring together 15 artists from India and abroad who are going beyond medium-specific artworks. The exhibition has 45-50 works spanning abstract paintings, meditative ink works, mixed media, impasto and modern devotional styles, alongside large-scale installations, that will be on display.
The Indian artists represented in the exhibition are based across Gurugram, Guwahati, Aurangabad, Baroda, Bengaluru, Pune, and Mumbai, while the international contingent comes from Norway, Russia and the USA. The participating artists include Meena Yadav, Rita Chhawchharia, Puja Sharma, Rakhee Shah, Tithi Arekar, Bhavna Madhani, Nidhi Charan, Amita Goswami, Kalpesh Chavan, Rachana Karia, Shweta Badhani Modi, Kailas Kale, Cheena Madan, Rakhi Baid, Olga Vikhonina and Kanchan Mahante.
“The centre has dissolved,” says Chopra. “Contemporary Indian art is no longer defined by just a few metros or one aesthetic. We are seeing fearless experimentation, a return to slow, handmade processes like ink and textile, alongside bold abstract vocabularies that are globally resonant yet very rooted.”
Unique artworks at the exhibition
One of the exhibition’s anchors is a large-scale modular artwork comprising 108 individual small canvases. Each canvas is complete in itself, carrying an organic, gestural motif in ochres, terracotta, deep greens and earthy browns. Placed together, however, the 108 pieces create a much larger composition of three rising, temple-like forms. The work becomes particularly intriguing when viewed through the significance of its number. The number is embedded in Indian spiritual and ritual traditions, transforms the act of painting into repetition, meditation and ritual. The individual canvases can be read as fragments, seeds or sacred forms; together, they become something larger – a community, a landscape, almost a shrine. “For me, as a curator, this work embodies the entire philosophy of our current show – 15 individual artistic voices coming together to create a larger movement,” shares Chopra.
The exhibition’s other major installation moves in an entirely different direction. A monumental textile installation brings together fibre, weave, found fabric and painstaking hand processes such as sewing and knitting, turning softness into architecture. Rather than sitting quietly on a wall as an object of craft, textile occupies space, changes the viewer’s movement through it and demands to be experienced from different angles. The work opens up a larger conversation around labour, memory, sustainability, gender and the long history of textile-making, while simultaneously demonstrating how far contemporary artists are willing to take materials that have traditionally existed outside the fine-art vocabulary.
The exhibition was inaugurated on September 22 in the presence of actor Mahima Chaudhry, composer Dhirendra Mulkalwar of ‘Hanuman Ansh’ fame, noted philanthropist Dr Aneel Kashi Murarka, veteran artist Kiran Chopra, along with the curators and the artists. Adding a soulful touch to the occasion, Dhirendra Mulkalwar sang ‘Siyavar Ramchandra Ki Jai’, his composition from the box office hit film ‘Hanuman Ansh’, too.
The unique group art show is scheduled to run from September 22 to 28 at the Nehru Centre AC Art Gallery in Worli from 11 am to 7 pm.
Why you should check out this new art exhibition in Mumbai this September
