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THE TIMES OF INDIA, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1982

Lukewarm show by emigre artists 

By Our Art Critic

THE works of five Indian artists living abroad are on view currently at Gallery Chemould. After the show closes on December 18, five more emigre artists will offer their work at the same gallery (closing date: December 31).

The work of four of these ten artists has been shown here by the same gallery. Zarina and Mohan Samant, now on view, have not exhibited in the city for many years. From the first group, Avinash Chandra has made a name for himself in the Europe of the 60's but has not exhibited in India at all. Dev and Anju Chowdhary from the current quintet are, for all practical purposes, unfamiliar names.

Generally, Indian artists doing well in Europe or the U.S. do not find it easy to exhibit their typical work in India at regular intervals. Even those who pay frequent visits here either do not bring their work or bring only small-size specimens which can be easily transported. Logistical difficulties have also apparently affected the scope of the Chemould show. 

One was lucky to see Mohan Samant's vintage works at the Festival of India exhibition organized by Alkazi in Oxford. Even though his ink and color drawing in the present show are not the type of full-fledged paintings one saw at Oxford, they are even more delightfully airy. They are as idiosyncratic as the Oxford canvases, little masterpieces of line drawing in black and in colour. The humorously distorted figurative outlines indicate a new stance in this wildly rakish but lovable Bombay painter who has long been a name to reckon with in the New York art world. 

Compared to the impact of the Samant paintings, the rest is total or 

Art

comparative disappointment. Since one does not know Avanash Chandra's work as well as his reputation abroad, it is difficult to assess the line and colour drawing offered by him. They appear to be feeble by-products of a bygone era. 

Dev from Bern ("projected by a Swiss gallery!) is mannered in his mixed media easays, puny in scale and conventionally avant-garde. Anju Chowdhary's graphics are exuberant in colour and "Indian" in workmanship but nowhere near the standards attained by graphicists here.

GRAPHICS

Zarina had made an indelible impact with her last shows of drawings and graphics, held in Bombay and Delhi. She is represented here by geometrical designs which neither touch your heart nor excite you as anything novel. One likes to remember, therefore, the serenity of her charming personality as it impinged on one's mind during her visit to the 1976 Triennale in New Delhi in the company of the graphics genius, Krishna Reddy.

Except for Anju Chowdhary, all the artists are represented by barely three works each. This scarcity of samples adds to the lukewarm impression left by this well-meaning show. It is no patch at all on the retrospective of Krishna Reddy's graphics sponsored by Chemould last year. The catalogue, however, includes useful and up-to-date bio-datas of these ten prodigal heirs of contemporary Indian art.

INDIAN EXPRESS (Sunday Edition) DECEMBER 12 1932
CULTURAL ROUNDABOUT

Statement & lyric

By ROSHAN SHAHANI

The Chemould Gallery has organised an exhibition of Indian artists from abroad. The exhibition is in two parts featuring five artists in each section.

A Paris-based painter, Anju Chowdhary, displays a fine senisibility [[sensibility]] preoccupied with the cycle of seasons and the movement of nature. Carrying the poetry and substance of landscape traditions in her work, she has textured her small sized graphics with the colours of her mind and given a direct, physical feel of nature like foliage or sap, perhaps blood.

The positiveness of burgeoning nature and continuity of birth and rebirth are stressed in her pictures. Introduced into the poetry of landscape is the actual and graphic cycle of time as in Paysage au Cercle (hiver) and Paysage au Cercle (autumn). The visualisation is combination of statement with lyrical tones. Sometimes the surface is worked upon intensely, to generate pulsations like, Paysage au Cavee. What one does appreciate in these graphics on the whole is the sensuous and intuitive response which comes easily along with an ordered and objective view of time.

The ink and water colour paintings of Avinash Chandra who is based in the UK are essentially designs with an imagery of torsos and limbs which float and surge around like micro organisms being examined.

Almost politically oriented Mohan Samant's drawings in pen, ink and water colour are executed in mixed technique. Samant has always laid aside the organic values of painting. Here the pictorial surface is broken up by the density of ripples of ink and open line drawings of figures and objects. The drawings are urban, in that they are an assemblage of images which make a comment on everyday reality like an episode. Samant is inclined to make signs in his paintings, whether it is a motif on a village wall or the depiction of a person. The unstructured effect gives a spontaneous appearance to the picture.

Creating a kind of programme of pictorial explorations, Dev who is settled in Switzerland, works in mixed media on paper. The graphics of circles within squares and the miniaturised painted squares are strung together in harmonious relationships. There is good taste here but the concern of the artist revolves around form and colouring techniques. The smallness of the bits of paper used, as in numbers seven and eight invites minute observation of painstaking craft. It is refreshing in a way to see the hands so skillfully employed, when most of the time, in the west, one can witness technological paraphernalia taking precedence over the labour of hands and minds in art.

The piquant title of Spaces to Hide in one of Zarina's paintings belies the painting itself. The effort is to achieve the spaces through meticulous symetry [[symmetry]] — rows upon rows of little triangles, black-grey on similar background. Pure symmetry without an ambiguous field can look rather flat. An attempt is made to vary the colour but all that happens is that it looks nice like a good fabric one would like to wear. Perhaps Zarina's interest in paper and paint has led her to organise patterns rather than make a painterly image.