London — The National Gallery is opening an exhibit this week about how experts use technology to properly identify art works and detect forgeries.

The exhibit, “Close Examination – Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries,” shows how devices such as infrared imaging, X-rays and a gas-chromatography-mass-spectrometer can be used to peel back layers of time in art.

One painting on exhibit is “The Virgin and Child with an Angel,” which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1924. It was believed to be by Italian painter Francesco Francia until a similar painting hit the market.

Last year, an investigation found the museum’s work was a fake.

The exhibit opens Wednesday and lasts until mid-September.

Evanescence is a solo exhibition by Indian photographer Priyanka Sachar. Through her exhibit, she strings together various slices of life. On till July 8, from 8 am to 10 pm, at Bagel’s Café, D-140, The Shopping Mall, Arjun Marg, DLF City I, Gurgaon

A two-man art exhibition titled Crossing Over by New Delhi-based Amitesh Verma and USA-based Andrew Connelly. Amitesh Verma’s body of work has been created during his three-month residency at France. On till June 25, from 11 am to 7.30 pm, at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, 205, Tansen Marg

Crossing Paths, a photo exhibition by Australian photo-journalists in South Asia — Daniel Barehulak, Graham Crouch and Adam Ferguson. On till June 18, from 6.30 to 7.30 pm, at Murray Harris Room,  Australian High Commission, 1/50 G, Shantipath, Chanakyapuri

The city-based Sampoorn organisation is bringing in many artistes from all across the country and is ready to present an exhibition of handcrafted articles.

The ten-day Sampoorn Crafts Fair 2010 will be held from June 18 to June 27 at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat.

Craftsmen, artists’ associations and organisations are participating in this mega fair. The products, reflecting the flavour of rural India, is sure to attract the visitors. The entire Indian ‘art world’ will open up in this exhibition. Among the prominent items on display will be dhokra cast metal and iron items, terracotta, pottery, silver and metal jewellery and bamboo products. Apart from these, there will be natural soaps, stationery items made out of hand, oil etc.

You can also find Manipur’s Longpi pottery here. These were used during marriages and other festivals. But today, they are being used to decorate offices and modern buildings. Oak wood silks from Uttarkhand, art depicting epics from West Bengal, fabrics of Gujarat, Pateena craft from Delhi, bamboo craft and grass art forms from Kerala, pottery from Jaipur, marble from Uttar Pradesh, Thanjavur art forms, Ganjeefa art from Mysore, handloom products, organic foods from Andhra Pradesh along with furniture and tribal jewellery will be presented.  The exhibition timings are 10 am to 7.30 pm. For details, call 9845597553.

One of India’s big name artists collaborates with a Mumbai serigraph studio to make limited edition prints of Burman’s fine art over silk threads.

Lavesh Jagasia of The Serigraph Studio, honored Indian artist Sakti Burman, and Mumbai’s old Pundole Art Gallery in Fort took three years to complete an exhibition of limited edition serigraphs titled The Complete Collection by Sakti Burman which launches in Mumbai today. They will go to show in Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi and Kolkata.

Whenever an artist print-maker produces an original stencil print using the hand-held screen-printing method these are classified as serigraphs — the medium for this exhibition. In Latin ‘seri’ means silk and in Greek ‘graphos’ means to draw, hence the word ‘serigraph’ literally means to draw through silk.
“I am very enthusiastic towards this new dimension to the art world,” Jagasia says. “After doing a thorough research of the visual arts scene in the developed and mature art markets, the obvious answer was serigraphs as this type of print offers a wide colour spectrum and by virtue of the inks being applied layer by layer it gives a perspective and depth to the images. These prints are regarded as ‘multiple originals’ by the artist. The market for multiple originals is huge and here to stay.”

You can assume Jagasia knows what he’s talking about. The list of artists he’s collaborated with at The Serigraph Studio include Indian masters such as S.H. Raza, Paritosh Sen, Jogen Chowdhury, Ram Kumar, Jehangir Sabavala, K. G. Subramanyam, Rameshwar Broota, Ganesh Haloi, Lalu Prasad Shaw and Manu Parekh among others.

The 24 limited edition serigraphs for sale at this show are based on choicest Burman paintings encompassing the last two decades of this legendary painter’s artistic evolution. Burman’s harmonious merging of imagery from the east and west comes naturally to an Indian artist who has lived most of his life in Paris, but is profoundly in touch with his Indian roots.

For 15 years, Qatar-based Indian artist Smita Aloni has been painting to help preserve a dying art form which dates back 1500 AD.

Aloni was the featured artist on the first-ever art exhibition recently organised by Standard Chartered Bank Qatar. Bank officials, parents, children and guests attended the successful one-day exhibition held at Standard Chartered D-Ring Road Branch.

Phad painting is a traditional Indian art form based on an epic in praise of the good deeds of King Pabuji. It is derived from the word ‘par’ which literally means ‘scroll’ in the local language. The scroll painting which was originally about 15ft in length and four to five feet high was used by storytellers to narrate the epic.

“This art form is not commonly known since it was restricted to one part of India,” Aloni explained.

She said the art form has been preserved through family tradition passing it from one generation to another but is threatened to disappear because very few artists nowadays practice the art form since it requires a lot of patience to make and does not guarantee good financial rewards.

Using hand made brushes and natural colours sourced from India, Aloni creates her paintings following very detailed style for them to look authentically phad. Her wide collection spans 10 years of dedication to the traditional art.

‘Scenes from the Palace’, ‘Procession of King’ and ‘Mythological Elephant’ were some of Aloni’s notable paintings exhibited during the exposition.

Apart from being a professional artist, Aloni also teaches painting to children, from whom she said she derived much inspiration from.

An exhibition of dozens of works by the children was also held. The paintings revolved around a theme on French Art following the technique of legendary French painter Rousseau.

The paintings depicted animals, forests, flowers, sun, moon and other objects of nature. Collage and paper mache art including glass, tile and ceramic paintings were also put on display.

“For more people to appreciate this art form, artists should make it simpler, such as lessening the number of characters for each painting,” Aloni said, as she showed examples of silk paintings in which she focused on just one central character.

The Whitechapel Gallery’s scan of photography from the Indian subcontinent is enormous. One hundred and fifty years, three countries, several hundred works (from the documentary tradition, the private, the commercial, from contemporary-art … ). Poor photography, still the last medium in which such sweeping gestures are considered to make any sense. The result of the ambition of this show is that it has to skate almost trivially over vast acreages of great interest. It makes a wonderful invitation to seek more detail, but it provides little detail itself.

The impulse for the exhibition is both laudable and negative. The very rich presence (both past and present) of photography in south Asia has many aspects which do not fit into patterns dictated by the history of photography as written in Europe and the United States. So this exhibition, unlike many earlier, seeks to show only works by photographers from the region and to allow their expressions of cultural values to be heard in their own context. This is worthy enough, but it is lopsided. From the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century, its development on the subcontinent was influenced by developments in Europe. To try to look the other way is perhaps a necessary shove to a pendulum which has been stuck on the Eurocentric side for too long, but it is an adversarial position and not a neutral scholarly one.Spread over two floors of the large gallery space, the show looks oddly drab on the lower floor and much more lively above. It is arranged thematically and not by date, and the curators follow five threads (the portrait, performance, the family, the street, and the body politic). These are more or less arbitrary, and they intersect often.

The grouping allows for lively comparisons, and provides a minimum of necessary guidance to European viewers in a maze of mostly new names and stories. But the stories, in truth, are better told in the book which accompanies the exhibition. On the walls are lots of pictures with minimal context, a kaleidoscope of snippets.

It is full of fascinating and lovely things. Here is a doorkeeper from the 1880s by the great Lala Deen Dayal, tiny against his massive studded door, with the sweep of shadow across the great door matched by the sweep of his dark cloak across his belly. Here is an exciting construction from 2007 by Rashid Rana in which the repeating pattern of the surface treatment of the twin towers in New York is made of thousands of little views of street-scenes in Lahore – Rana’s point being that the great shining vertical cities are often made by the labour of those who live in the sprawling dusty horizontal ones.

Here, too, is Umrao Singh Sher-Gil prancing about in his underpants on a bed in Paris looking like the villainous fakir in the “Tintin” books. Far from being a comic figure, however, Sher-Gil is of great importance in the story of Indian photography. Born to an aristocratic Punjabi family in 1870, he was a linguist and classical scholar as well as an enthusiast for craft skills like carpentry and calligraphy. He married a Hungarian opera singer and spent a large proportion of the 1920s and 1930s in Budapest and Paris, from where he brought back all that was newest in photography. But he had been an enthusiast for years: his early pictures date from the late 1880s, and he was perhaps among the very first in India to adopt the autochrome process of the Lumière brothers.

Umrao Sher-Gil was the father of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil (who died young in the 1940s) and the grandfather of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. Both of these have a part to play in this exhibition, where Sundaram reworks his grandfather’s pictures by a form of computerised collage which is both a tender dip in the family archive and a more acerbic contemplation of the various parts taken by photography as catalyst or protagonist in personal identification.

The exhibition is full of links of this kind. A pleasing one is in the simple portrait by S.B. Syed from the 1850s of a woman hand-tinting a photograph. The presence of hand-tinting reminds us that the glorious tradition of miniature painting was not replaced by photography in India so much as teamed with it. Here, the meticulously detailed jewellery on the female sitter turns out to be the same as that worn by the artist who is seen painting it. Did the jewellery belong to the studio, to lend a certain social cachet to the fee-paying sitters? It seems likely. In Europe, gilding the photographic lily by hand-tinting fell (under modernist pressure) to the status of tastelessness. In India, not so.

To demonstrate that a separate photographic culture exists in India is the point of the show, and it does that well. It is to be hoped that it acts as an invitation to others to fill in the gaps, because this show, for all its vastness, is only a tentative beginning of a story that will continue to be told. It’s also a challenge to get full value from a show which achieves a great deal at the ultimate expense of depth

The Terre Offshore exhibition brings together the works of 11 artists from Reunion Island
You know from the moment you step in and see a metre-long work of art poised on bright red-striped plastic buckets — that you have entered the topsy-turvy world of artists. A word of advice for those who venture into this territory: leave all preconceptions of art outside the door. You won’t find place for them in here.
In India, as part of the Bonjour India Festival of France, the Terre Offshore exhibition curated by Francine Méoule brings together the works of 11 independent artists from Reunion Island. Four among them are here for the Chennai segment of the exhibition, giving us their take on the world through mixed mediums of contemporary art: from video installations to coloured inks on paper, and even adhesive on canvas.
A fragment of Europe
Try and pinpoint Reunion Island on the map, and you will be able to do just that. The miniscule speck of land to the East of Madagascar has the intriguing particularity of being a “fragment of Europe in the middle of the Indian Ocean”, and is as fascinating in its ethnic divergence as in its defiance of geographical norms. The once uninhabited island was occupied by the French in the mid-1600s, and was populated over the years by a mix of ethnicities. Its contemporary culture is rooted in African, Indian, Chinese, and French traditions, and its citizens are bound together by the shared Creole language. Such a crucible of cultures would form the classic breeding ground for art’s favourite musing, the agonising question of identity — or so we may expect.
Surprisingly, and yet refreshingly, the exhibition does not harp on issues of identity and on the continuous search thereof. It is certainly among the concerns of some, for as artist Jack Beng-Thi explains: “He who doesn’t know his history is always perturbed, and art has always been a means of expressing history”. But the younger generation of artists have different preoccupations. “Identity was largely questioned by artists of Reunion Island in the Seventies,” says Stefan Barniche. “I see myself as being in suspension, perhaps lost, but positively so, and have digested the question of identity. I deal with its more global aspect, its imprecision, its passages in form, and its continuous gliding, as reflected in my use of mixed mediums of art.”
Other artists simply draw from the contemporary world around them, and deal with direct, everyday observations. “I explore the relationship between colours, notions of disguise and revelation, and the interaction between living beings, in my work”, explains young artist, Gabrielle Manglou. “When the wind touches a leaf, there is life in that movement, and that is what I try and express through my drawings, sculptures, and videos.” There are others who examine the mechanics of space and time. Artist Yohann Quëland de Saint-Pern uses audio-visual displays to enquire into man’s relation to his geographical, physical, and mental surroundings. “I try and understand why we construct houses in one way in Reunion Island, in another way in France, and in a third way in India. My work is mainly concerned with geography, territories, and the body as the first interface with others.”
An array of ideas depicted through multiple forms, all challenging spectators to shed the preconceived ideas they might have of syncretic art, and interpret what they see before them through a fresh lens. As art critic Bernard Marcadé contends, Terre Offshore suggests “an extra-territorial dimension, a stage open to new adventures, and therefore, a platform to create new things”. A new experience of art is what you should come prepared for then — and you just might save yourself from tripping over the flat-screen TV lying on the floor, as you enter the exhibition.
The Terre Offshore-Reunion Island exhibition is on at Apparao Galleries until February 4. For details, call 28279803 or 28271477.

“Kalpana”, anIndian art exhibition of 29 digitally produced prints of well-known paintings of eminent Indian artistes representing human figure forms and created over a span of more than a century has opened in this Kazakhstan capital.

Starting with Jamini Roy, the exhibition also includes the works of Amrita Shergil, M F Husain, F N Souza and Krishen Khanna, as well as some of the more contemporary and current artistes like Anjolie Ela Menon, Manjit Bawa and Arpana Caur.

“The paintings display the vibrancy and dynamism of Indian art during the 20th century,” said a statement from the Indian Embassy here that has organised the exhibition.

“The exhibition represents an underlying emphathetical harmony in the aesthetic stimulus of Indian art and the seamless manner in which several artistic influences belonging to the traditional and modern styles have coalesced over the last century,” the statement added.

The exhibition was inaugurated on Tuesday by Indian Ambassador Ashok Sajjanhar at a glittering ceremony attended by a cross-section of lovers and admirers of Indian art and culture including members of the Kazakh parliament as well as several ambassadors from countries like Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Romania, Spain, Austria and Italy.Speaking on the occasion, Sajjanhar said that the exhibition “represents the completion of a productive and fruitful year of expansion in bilateral relations since the visit of President (Nursultan) Nazarbayev to India as the chief guest at our 60th Republic Day celebrations in January 2009.”

He pointed out that the last one year has seen significant deepening of engagement through several events organised by the Embassy like the India-Expo in Almaty in May 2009 and two grand gala concerts of Indian Classical Dances and Music in Astana and previous capital Almaty and in November 2009.

Several contracts and agreements to further enhance and promote bilateral economic and commercial cooperation have been signed between companies of the two countries during this period.

Sajjanhar also expressed the hope that the exhibition of paintings by 14 eminent artistes of India would further strengthen people-to-people contact and promote understanding and cooperation between India and Kazakhstan.

 The youth icons of National Hockey selected for the international competition created of an uproar demanding their pending package just after the finish of National youth festival which is a matter of concern.

Internationally acclaimed sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik from Orissa appeal to save our National game through his sand sculpture, by appealing both the members of Indian Hockey federation and players to settle the matters soon giving due emphasis to the players demand. Also he appeals to all corners to save the fame of the Indian Hockey “our National Game” giving equal treatment with the Indian Cricket.

The state of Orissa is a producer of best hockey players of International standard like Dillip Tirky, Lzarus Barla, Ignes Tirky, Probodh Tirky and others.

Pattnaik created two crossed hockey sticks with ball on sand at Puri beach of Orissa. He took 5 hours and use 8 tones of sand and also his students joins hand to create this sand image.
Before it Pattnaik participated different sport activities like World cup Cricket-1998 at London, FIFA World cup-2006 at Berlin, Doha Asian game etc. He has so far participated in more than 39 international sand sculpture championships across the world and won many awards for the country.