ROOTS ROUTES-2

ROOTS ROUTES

Modernity, pertaining to any of the other creative arts has been a tricky issue. For long, being modern meant being westernized. But, there were voices in India that urged artists to evolve an indigenous modernity by turning away from European models and seek inspiration in home-grown art and classical traditions. Back to the future, if you will.

Our exhibit focuses on artists who straddle different generations and genres of painting. They have explored and experimented with Indian traditional art--classical, miniature, folk, indigenous abstraction or tribal. Doing so has allowed them to find a new visual vocabulary to express themselves. They continue to give these traditions contemporary validity while simultaneously engaging with international modernism.

Paradoxically, the way forward is through the past. Primitive art is widely thought to mirror a universal phase of primeval consciousness still embedded in the unconscious mind. Tapping into folk and tribal art and its atavistic memories and pictorial symbolism is like tapping into psychoanalyst Carl Jung's notion of a collective unconscious.  It brings you face to face with primal encounters with nature.

ARPANA CAUR, ASHOK HAZRA, BADRI NARAYAN, HAKU SHAH, JANGARH SINGH SHYAM, JAPANI SHYAM, JAYASRI BURMAN, K.S.KULKARNI, LALU PRASAD SHAW, LAXMA GOUD, NEELKANT CHOUDHARY, RAMANANDA BANDYOPADHYAY, ROOHAN SEGEL, SUHAS ROY