REDRAWING ARTSCAPES

Aniruddha Sarker's paintings depict his association with and fondness for nature, natural entities, and women figures across cultures. Women figures are always foregrounded and the backdrops are usually urban, semi-urban or natural spaces. Sometimes the lines of the concrete structures are blurred, creating diffuse and vapour lines and sometimes they are rock solid, almost palpable in appearance.

Manoj Deb's artistic idiom is dominated by his colour palette with an overpowering and unnerving presence of different shades and tints of red. His vision is guided by a preoccupation to blur boundaries between art, illustration and graphics, though his medium is consistently acrylic on canvas which enables him to express his creative process with a great degree of control.

Meenu Garg has mastered an artform that is replete with connotations of divergences and bifurcations in a very sophisticated style. Forked twigs and branches and corals or any natural form that evolves and undergoes change through the cycle of birth, maturity and death is either the sole subject of her works or is alongside a human figure in stark thematic contrast and yet in structural harmony. Garg's forte as an artist is finesse and order but her works can evoke multifarious nuances and emotions.

Palas Biswas creates works that are guided by a visceral intensity that is extremely rare. His art is an expression not just of an artist but also of the aspirations of art itself to destabilise and terraform the prevalent artscapes. Untramelled rage leads to cataclysmic shifts and then is channelled into ferocious feral intensity of a bull and then suddenly in an urban scene the same style transforms into a serene balance with echoes of the same intensity. He is an artist of the people who can put the viewer in a state of trance with a juxtaposition of the grotesque and the beautiful.

Preeti Sethi is a sculptor, painter and poet who is able to use her multidisciplinary approach in her paintings. Her thematic variance is strongly socio-cultural but, on occasion, she delves into the esoteric through very strong visual associations. Her art can transition from the figurative to the formal and scriptural with the human element always present, even if dormant. Sethi is an artist who tries to speak through her and doesn't try to guide the audience or reinforce her thought processes. That is why her art speaks eloquently and vociferously on its own.

Prithuj Mondal's works are a study in the violent fusion of symmetry and asymmetry, geometric forms and human shapes, artistic consistency and singular rebelliousness. Intricacies of form and shapes might overwhelm the visual sense but the emotions and human experiences cannot escape the audience. Mathematical forms reach a fever pitch, a contradiction of remarkable proportions, and yet we are able to discern it with ease. The forms are less than the shapes and figures, yet more. The vision is infinite, but accessible. That is the power of his art.

Rita Kathuria's passion for art is conveyed through her attempts at including a diverse range of figurative portraiture and flower studies. The fragility of flowers and their precarious existence is highlighted in a very resplendent and vibrant manner. The colour palette is soothing and gentle and has almost a therapeutic effect on the viewer. The ephemeral, yet naturally beautiful aesthetics of her works possess a universal appeal and also help lighten the mood for the audience.

Seema Singh explores human emotions and relationships through a distinctive artistic style that is able to appeal to people of ages. Her works focus on human experiences and project an transcendence within the cosmic order. Liberation, detachment and regeneration are themes that have been woven into the fabric of her art. Granular aggregations merge and segregate from figures and shapes disintegrate and build human figures. These contradictions are highlighted in an adept manner in her works.