Archive for June, 2010

30
Jun

Impact in pastels

   Posted by: admin    in Art News Updates

Ravi Joshi's work

Brevity is the soul of wit, they say. Brevity is also the hallmark of Ravi Joshi’s frames, eleven in all, which were on show at Gallery OED basement, presented by The Loft, Mumbai. Communication can be in loud clear tones, one liners, packed with meanings or even with a meaningful look. So can art be. Ravi Joshi, a designer/artist, based at Ahmedabad, employs the latter techniques to drive home his point. It’s amazing how much pastels can convey, in a minimalistic manner. Brevity in tones, lines and maybe mass, but there are layers of meanings.

If you spend enough time before one work, chances are that you will see it in different ways and the paintings grow on you. The show was titled, ‘Landshapes, a gestalt of paint and action’.

Look at the paintings in acrylic without any pre-conceived notions. There are busts and busts and bodies too. At first they seem just blobs of paint, haphazardly stretched over the canvas. On closer examination from a distance, faces, shoulders and figures emerge, Somewhere thin lips take form, a nose and then eureka, you see a hug, a kiss and maybe a little more. Joshi lets you into his paintings by stages and there is no fixed route to reach out to what he wants to say. Bordering on the abstract, yet figurative to a great extent, some of them sure are erotic, if you put two and two together, even if he did not intend to, which is very remote. There are possibilities galore for one work to convey more emotions than are explicit.

The designer in Joshi meets the artist in him in most works, for they are designed to make the viewer use his imaginativeness to the fullest. For Joshi, in his late twenties, is also a fashion designer from NIFT and also a teacher, besides taking a keen interest in fashion photography. Deeply interested in reviving dying traditional arts related to textiles and also rural knowhow in this sector, he is an ardent proponent of khadi too, promoting its use in current fashion and apparel. This was his second solo.

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30
Jun

Now get a Raza on your carpet

   Posted by: admin    in Art News Updates

Imagine a Raza or a Manjit Bawa painting on your drawing room wall? Art works by the Indian masters have transcended the walls to occupy unexplored realms.

‘Fly Your Own Carpet to Your Walls’ — a first of its kind charity exhibition of limited edition hand-woven carpets — features reproductions of selected works by contemporary masters of art and design. The carpets have been created by Sunil Sethi Design Alliance to raise funds for Maneka Gandhi’s People for Animals (PFA) initiative.

“Forty works, some rare, by 25 artists such as SH Raza, Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa are being reproduced in 10 pieces each. The price start from Rs 35,000 and go up to Rs 5 lakh. Each work comes with a certificate by the artist. So you can get an original SH Raza artwork which costs crores, for around 5 lakh. We hope to generate funds for veterinary hospitals across the country,” says PFA founder Maneka Gandhi.

While Jehangir Sabavala, TM Vaikuntam, Manu Parekh, Jayasri Burman, Paresh Maity and GR Iranna are some other artists featured, works by fashion designers such as Rohit Bal, Manish Arora, Rajesh Pratap Singh, are also in  the collection, to be showcased in the capital next month.

Says Sunil Sethi, whose Design Alliance is driving the initiative, “These pieces can either be hung on walls or used as floor carpets. However, two works, one each by Husain and Manjit Bawa, with images of religious deities, are only to be hung on the wall.”

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