Women in Contemperory Indian Art

Throughout the centuries, women have been involved in making
art, whether as creators and innovators of new forms of artistic
expression, patrons, collectors, sources of inspiration, or
significant contributors as art historians and critics. Women have
been and continue to be integral to the institution of art, but
despite being engaged with the art world in every way, many
women artists have found opposition in the traditional narrative of
art history. They have faced challenges due to gender biases, from
finding difficulty in training to selling their work and gaining
recognition. In India too, women artists have been the subject of
varying degrees of critical attention and neglect throughout
history; as recently as the mid-20th century.

Though there hasn't been a complete transformation, we see an
improvement. In this exhibition, we showcase some of the well
known contemporary senior and emerging women artists, while
critically drawing attention to their individual processes of art-
making, style, artistic expression, and their art itself. Neither a
survey nor a commentary, this show is an insight into the
variegated oeuvres of Anjani Reddy, Anju Dodiya, Jayasri Burman,
Nilima Sheikh, Poushali Das, P.S. Jalaja, Reena Saini Kallat, Rekha
Rodwittiya, Seema Kohli, Soghra Khurasani and Sujata Bajaj.
Trailblazers in their own right, these women have become strong
voices in art and art history today and continue to inspire
generation of artists...

Anjani Reddy

Anjani Reddy’s creations are a celebration of hope and life that
reflect experiences absorbed from the artist’s immediate
surroundings and the women she meets in day-to-day life. She
weaves these assorted images and intricate nuances from her
memory into a string of visual collograph. Women have
remained the artist’s favourite protagonist and get manifested in
the works in varying stages of their life, in multiple roles and in
varied emotional upheavals. Simple and meaningful, there is an
obvious trace of warmth, tranquillity and lyrical spiritualism in
her works that cannot be missed.

Artist: Anjani Reddy
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 4 X 4 inches

Artist: Anjani Reddy
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 4 X 4 inches

Artist: Anjani Reddy
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 4 X 4 inches

Anju Dodiya

Anju Dodiya's compositions are layered with images and
symbolism. Her art is rooted in the figurative, drawing
inspiration from a range of artists including poet Sylvia Plath,
filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and Early Renaissance masters
Piero della Francesca and Giotto. Bold patterns and vivid colours
of Medieval French tapestries and Japanese woodblock prints
also influence her works. Often autobiographical, her works
reveal her interest in self-reflection and the process of self-
discovery. Dodiya’s self keeps recurring in the changing pictorial
contexts. These are inward-looking investigations with a keen
sense of self-awareness and introspection. Her works compel the
viewer to unravel stories of the female protagonists, yet they
don’t reveal the full narrative. Dodiya continually creates her
own legends that are often self-disruptive autobiographies.

She has exhibited her works all over the country and the world
and has her works in various private and public collections. She
lives and works in Mumbai.

Artist: Anju Dodiya
Title: Cloud Hunter
Medium: Acrylic on Mattress
Size: 78 x 46 X 8 inches
Year: 2005

NOT FOR SALE

Jayasri Burman

Inspired by the Indian folk elements the imagery in Jayasri
Burman`s works has a dream-like lyrical quality with a unique
sensitivity. Her paintings retain a quality of refreshing candour
and reflective honesty, that is as original as it is endearing. She
weaves the decorative and design element of the folk idiom into
the intricate patterns of her canvas, without losing the natural
charm and naivete of her work. Women continue to be the
primary character in her story, as she shows various women
both godly and human partaking in the bounties of life.

Jayasri`s closeness to Nature has also reflected her in works. She
can reinterpret the lush green environs, the hybridized imagery
of a woman in her grace and form, the stagnant pools that bring
out the flaming colours of spring, in her paintings. Jayasri`s latest
oeuvre reveals unconscious suspended energy that can find its
parallel in the environs of Santiniketan, where she studied. If she
expressed a tranquil sanguine feel in the images she reflected
two years ago, this time her vehicle of expression is the dance of
colour.

Artist: Jayasri Burman
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 36 x 36 inches

Artist: Jayasri Burman
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 36 x 48 inches

Artist: Jayasri Burman
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 48 x 84 inches

Nilima Sheikh

One of the iconic figures of contemporary Indian art, Nilima
Sheikh’s engagement with art has spanned over four decades.
Rooted in Eastern painting traditions such as miniature painting,
oral tradition found in vernacular folk songs, as well as her own
life experience, she continues to create bodies of work that evoke
mystical imaginary landscapes that address feminine
experiences. She uses traditional tempera painting techniques to
question the darker sides of Indian traditions such as arranged
marriages, which often subvert women. The artist used text from
vernacular folk songs along with the paintings, a motif that has
continued in her work decades later. Her practice has embraced
various kinds of tempera painting, from the hand-held miniature
to the construct at an architectural scale, and from
conventionally hung paintings to scrolls and screens for the
theatre stage. The narrative is at the heart of all of her work.
Inspired by reading Rabindranath Tagore, the artist became
interested at an early age in the connection between stories and
images, an age-old connection from murals to ancient
manuscripts. Beyond appropriating traditional techniques in her
work, Sheikh works with figure and narration in her
practice.Over the decades, her practice has maintained its
feminist commitment to representing the many facets of
womanhood: in the realms of the sacred and biographical, and
as a labouring social subject.

Artist: Nilima Sheikh

Title: Untitled

Medium: Mixed Media on paper

Size: 24 x 19 inches

Poushali Das

The captivating depiction of mythology, presented in little
miniature-inspired vignettes on the large swathes of silk is a
result of many years of study and experimentation with the
tempera technique. Poushali Das's fascination with mythology
dates back to her youth when she first began to study Buddhism,
but she made it a staple in her work for a reason that is far more
personal.

Her paintings have a rich, textured depth that is a result of
copious applications of layer after layer of tempera paint—made
on Muga silk. Continuing on the legacy of Bengal School, Das has
been working with the tempera wash style of painting while
rendering the much-loved medium in her deeply emotional,
carefully developed and constantly evolving artistic style.

Artist: Poushali Das
Title: Saptarishi
Medium: wash tempera on silk
Size: 18'' X 48''

Artist: Poushali Das Artist: Poushali Das
Title: magic blues moon Title: Oh my only friend, my
best beloved the gates are open in
light in forest my house -do not pass by like a
Medium: Wash tempera on silk. dream
Size: 72'' X 14'' Medium: Wash tempera on silk.
Size: 72'' X 29''

Artist: Poushali Das
Title: I keep gazing on
Medium : wash tempera on silk
Size: 72'' X 76''

PS Jalaja

A painter of people and plurality, PS Jalaja's works are responses
to her socio-political surroundings. People of various race,
ethnicity, language, styles, emotions and attitude, representing
cultures across the world, repeatedly appear in her work, as she
explores the local and global economical, political, racial and
religious issues bringing it into her creative space. Jalaja is an
active member of Kalakakshi, a Kochi-based collective of artists,
which take up and intervene in various social issues. Gauwngju
Biennale Foundation has named her as one of the 35 'Emerging
Asian Artists'.

Artist: PS Jalaja
Title: Tug Of War
Medium : Water Colour On Paper
Size: 360 X 48 inches
Year: 2013

Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat’s art practise is concerned with ideas that
hold each other in tension — barriers in a world of mobility,
porosity in sites of fissure, memorialisation in the aftermath of
amnesia, and the promise and illegibility of national legal
documents. Kallat’s interest in political and social borders—and
their violent cleaving through the land, people and nature—
resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in
India, which her family experienced. Kallat has researched
various histories of migration, the plunder of shared natural
resources for national gain, and archives of disappeared people.
The figure of the hybrid has come to hold symbolic potential in
Kallat’s practice, like a truant against dividing lines and divisive
national narratives.

That barriers give way and can be subverted, is an idea that is
pronounced in Kallat’s work using electric cables twisted to
resemble barbed wire. She uses the paradox of the existence of
technology for a free flow of information and restriction on
movement to suggest that total isolation is not possible. Where
there is contact there is exchange and fusion.

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Artist: Reena Kallat
Title: Untitled
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Size: 14 X 22 inches
Year: 2005

Rekha Rodwittiya

Acclaimed artist Rekha Rodwittiya has served as an important
voice for the feminist movement in India. She is known for
paying tribute to the female form and its indefatigable spirit
through her works, thereby questioning the patriarchal system.
The representation of the female figure has been paramount for
her as it stands as a politically alert feminist practice of painting.
In her works she exploring archetypal figuration of the female
form in a celebratory mode. The disappearance of the male
figure from her work is not so much a measure of exclusion as it
is a positive assertion monumentalized figure of the female
protagonist.

The paintings, in bright and bold colours, continue to have
Rodwittiya's language in the form of feminine figures and
decorative but, symbolic tapestry. Giving an insight into her
usage of bright and bold colours, she states that the colours
bring about an optical association that further forges the viewer
into an association with her work. The artist draws on a heritage
of elemental imagery, tempered by psychological insights,
portraying women through the prism of personal experience and
day-to-day realities. Rodwittiya's work describes complex issues
of life and living, of alienation and belonging, of discrimination
and acceptance, of accord and discord.

Artist: Rekha Rodwittiya
Title: Untitled
Medium: Water Colour on paper
Size: 10 x 11 inches

Seema Kohli

Seema Kohli’s canvases are layered with stories rooted in myths,
a parable of tales both imagined and real, till one can no longer
tell the real from the imagined. The majestic feminine divine
reigns supreme in a fantastical world that is filled with wild and
unchained harmonies. She has over time has brought a synergy
of her unique sensibilities and her art. A realm of feminine
subjectivities, Kohli's art is a visual foretelling of a heightened
sense of consciousness. Within the genres of sexuality and
desire, one can't ignore the parallel journeys of discovery that
she has made. Being a student of philosophy, she has inhaled and
experienced myriad notions of existence and has lived emotional
and psychological reality. Her creative repertoire is eclectic,
encompassing a wide range of mediums ranging from painting,
murals, experiential installation performances, films to
installations, sculptures and each a unique expression of her
style.

Artist: Seema Kohli
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic and ink on canvas with

24 kt gold and silver leaf
Size: 3ft Dia (36 inches )

Artist: Seema Kohli
Title: Altered Reality
Medium: Acrylic and ink on canvas with

24 kt gold and silver leaf
Size: 72 x 48 inches

Artist: Seema Kohli
Title: Untitled
Medium: Acrylic and ink on canvas with

24 kt gold and silver leaf
Size: 24 X 24 inches

Soghra Khurasani

Baroda-based artist Soghra Khurasani is a print-maker by
training but has evolved the form into her own uniquely
evocative practice. Her works are textured and minutely
detailed—layered both in material and context. Soghra’s
artworks are primarily landscapes, in a manner that evokes the
female form. Over the course of her career, Soghra’s work has
become more abstract; the colours have mellowed down while
her figuration has become a lot bolder. The shades of red that
Khurasani has used in her work could stand for a number of
things — depending on the context, red is the colour of anger or
celebration, fertility or destruction. In her own way, Khurasani is
celebrating the resilience of the feminine.

Artist: Soghra Khurasani
Title: Silent Fields - 3
Medium : Wood cut print on paper
Size: 27 x 46 inches

Sujata Bajaj

Each of Sujata Bajaj's painting acts as a variation to her ancestral
inheritance. Such as the presence of the ochre yellow and the red
recalls the ritual circle of sacrifice; a hero-stone, a tribal totem, a
lost goddess of fertility suggests certain motifs.

Her oeuvre experiments across diverse mediums such as
etching, wood-cut, sculpture, murals, cold ceramic, fibre-glass,
metal, and acrylics on canvas. She has been associated with
organizations such as UNESCO and IIFA and displayed works on
global platforms such as Indiart at Tokyo, House of Lords at
London, Shanghai Art Fair at China, to list a few.

Artist: Sujata Bajaj
Title: Chakrapani
Medium: Mix Media on paper
Size: 32.20 x 18 inches