The exhibition of paintings mounted by the Palette Gallery of Delhi and the Gandhara Gallery of Kolkata at the Visual Art Gallery of the India Habitat Centre, Delhi, has made a fair bouquet of our artist celebrities of different levels.
The works of M F Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jogen Choudhury, Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, Arpita Singh, Vaikuntam, Prabhakar Kolte, Bhupen Khakhar, K G Subramanyan, Arpana Caur, Paresh Maity, Suhas Roy, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Jayshree Chakravarty, Shyamal Dutta Ray, Anupam Sud, Shobha Broota, Sudhir Patwardhan, Atul Dodiya, Yusuf Arakkal, Ganesh Haloi, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Neeraj Goswami, Natraj Sharma and Surendran Nair are all there. Then there are works for those with with a yen for upcoming names such as Iranna, Shibu Natesan, Aditya Basak, Baiju Parthan, Riaz Komu, A Balasubramanyam, Vasundhara Tiwari, Jayshree Burman, Krishnamachari Bose and Rajarshi Biswas, to name only a few.
The works, by and large, reflect a certain standard of excellence. One expects it of artists of stature, and the galleries concerned have chosen well. For all this, however, the show does not hang well. Each work has its own message and refuses to come together with others. There is a certain lack of harmony, perhaps because two galleries and two views of art do not coalesce easily always.
Still, Jogen Choudhury?s post-Gujarat works, with lacerated human beings, with a trishul symbol being placed between a female figure?s legs gives a powerful message about how high symbols and low deeds go together in our times. The works of Bhupen Khakhar, Chandra Bhattacharya, Anupam Sud, Vasundhara Tiwari and Iranna reflect the increasingly disintegrating wall between the male and the female images, while Arpana Caur, Yusuf Arakkal, Anjolie Ela Menon, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Vaikuntam, Paresh Maity and Neeraj Goswami reflect different angles of looking at women in our art. Paresh Maity, Natraj Sharma, Bhupen Khakhar and Sudhir Patwardhan reflect people in their social environment. Then there are the abstractionists, notably Ganesh Haloi, Shobha Broota and Kolte, who reflect the many traditions of this genre in our art.
Each of these themes could give us a good exhibition. But put together like this, they give one the feeling of a cocktail party.