Indian contemporary art is quietly becoming one of the best in the world. Three exhibitions in Delhi highlight this. There is the exhibition of Anita Dube, ?The Sleep of Reason…? at the India Habitat Centre, sponsored by ?Nature Morte? (a New York Gallery now functioning in New Delhi) and Atul Sinha?s ?Riding the Light? at the newly-opened Portuguese Cultural Centre in Vasant Vihar. The third exhibition is Anjolie Ela Menon?s symbolic sculptures in Murano glass at the Italian Cultural Centre.

The common elements in these are interesting to look at. The three exhibitions are ?joint ventures? with one Euro-American entity and an Indian artist it has chosen to project.

In my reading, this reflects the global arrival of Indian contemporary art as a major contender.

It also reflects the enormous versatility of our young artists. Dube is at her most versatile. She has exhibited a video, ?Homage to a Freight Train? which is an edited video film (priced at Rs 10,000 each) of Yoko One?s Nazi cattle-track shot through with bullets emanating shafts of light, one of which reaches out into the sky. This is a work of atonement for actions committed by the axis powers, shown both in Berlin and in Yokohama (where I watched the artist shooting the takes of her present video film).

Another work is an environmental sculpture of a colonial bedroom caked with dust. ??It is a subversive element,?? she says. ??You can keep people out of the door, but not the dust.??

This is a good lesson for those who plan elite events and find them shot through with criminals. Dube does not overlook this phenomenon. She objectifies it in a work ?Shri S Lund Kishore alias Raga Epidus alias Chikna? an assemblage of velvet-covered objects of Narcissism and violence. But the piece de resistance is her ?Waking of Unreason? with a Vajpeyi and Advani at the centre radiating into photographs of better days, the face of a riot victim and a Kar Sevak. This work, priced at Rs 1.5 lakh will be seen as one of the seminal works of this period. A number of works in the show have already sold for six figure prices. But I do think at least one of Dube?s major works ought to go to the NGMA.

Atul Sinha too is a radical artist, using the concept of utility to give us an art of human proportion. His man-size sculptures in wood may not have full body proportions, but they manage to become larger than they are when we sit on them and use them.

These works, priced at between Rs 25,000 and Rs 1 lakh, are an excellent buy as the conception of space, involving the mobile and immobile elements is both contemporary and original. His work is already in the NGMA collection. So buyers are dealing with an artist who has shown a stable and continuous development for over 20 years now.

And every time new experiments, like sculptures lit with an onysc glow being priced very reasonably at between Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000, emerge, they are being snapped up by those with an eye for what will have a place in the future of Indian art.

Anjalie Ela Menon is not unknown entity. She is the only woman artist who is in the same price bracket as MF Husain and FN Souza.

But her latest exhibition of sculptures in Murano glass from Italy is an important new area broken through by an Indian contemporary artist.

Through her we see the old symbols of the Hindu religion freed from dogma and emerging as the voice of the future emerging from the quiet deconstruction of the present.

These works, priced at between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, are already part of India?s art history. To me, the work of transparent Kali with a bright red tongue is a reflection also of the greed of consumers as the top most concern of religion today, geared more at gaining political advantage than enlightenment.

Put together, these three artists exhibit the originality of our art, both in terms of the different media used and radical thought embodied in them. They are mature and bold in their rendering. This is how art should be.