Art

Exhibition reviews and previews, artist interviews and features.

Tipu Sultan: Image & Distance

A new book and exhibition on the controversial ruler separate the monarch from the myth ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. A few years ago, Delhi Art Gallery acquired a seminal work, “The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultan”, painted in England after the death in 1799 of the Tiger of …

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A Bird’s-Eye View of the Raj

Science and whimsy mix in Delhi Art Gallery’s exhibition of Company paintings. ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. For Major-General Thomas Hardwicke, it wasn’t enough to employ an artist to paint the birds he came across in India. The naturalist and British East India Company officer also ‘employed a shikari to shoot …

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The Nature of Things

A rare exhibition from ‘somewhere in Northeast India’ forces you to see both the woods and the trees ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. Composing a landscape is inherently an act of taming nature. There isn’t necessarily a direct relation between the rules of artistic composition (perspective, thirds, movement within the frame) …

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The Great Defender

Appupen’s Rashtraman comics use ribald humour to reflect political reality ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. On November 28, Appupen put up an installment from his new comic book Rashtrayana II: Divide and Fool, which is being serialized on Brainded, the website and collective he co-founded five years ago. The chapter featured …

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Force and Composure

Krishen Khanna remembers Satish Gujral, who passed away on March 26, 2020 ♦ Note: After Satish Gujral died, I spoke to his friend and my grandfather, Krishen Khanna for India Today. This is what he had to say. My friendship with Satish Gujral feels eternal, did I know him for fifty years, or a thousand? …

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Protest Code

Suñatā Samantā: Emptiness Equality invites you to look beyond the obvious in art to see discontent and dissent ♦ Originally published in India Today. Scribbled on the back of a landing, positioned so that you see them as you walk down the stairs when leaving Suñatā Samantā, are two scraps of text in Hindi and …

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Exile and the Kingdom

An ongoing exhibition of miniatures inspired by the Ramayana, at the Met in New York City ♦ Originally published in India Today. Far from the bustling, big-ticket shows of Dutch Masters or Camp fashion, beyond the high-ceilinged galleries of large American canvases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a maze of jewel-box galleries. Hosting exhibitions …

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The Book of Waswo

The new miniatures from the studio of Waswo X. Waswo are as captivating as his latest photobook. ♦ Originally published in India Today. Nearly two decades ago, when Waswo X. Waswo was travelling in Pushkar, a group of camel herders started referring to him as “Chacha”. “The name just stuck,” the artist tells me in …

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The Angst of Being a Modern Indian

The Cosmopolitans ♦Anjum HasanPenguin India, 309 pages, Rs 499. “Being a modern Indian is hard work,” a former king tells Qayanaat, the protagonist of Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans. If this is true for the King, the dispossessed monarch of fictional, small-town Simhal, it’s certainly so for Qayanaat, a 53-year-old single woman who lives in Bengaluru, subsisting …

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Delhi-spotting

Looking for home at the National Museum’s Cosmology to Cartography: A Cultural Journey of Indian Maps exhibition.