These artworks frame Indian modernism as a plural condition rooted in visual memory, reimagined through formal adventures and individual visions across generations and geographies.
Modern Indian art did not emerge as a single style, at a single point in time, or from any one particular location.However, the common argument was that the new art surely was about how a changing society could be seen, experienced, remembered and imagined. The present exhibition brings together a distinctly diverse constellation of practices that transformed the visual language of twentieth-century India. At once intimately nearby and monumentally distant, lyrical and confrontational, the works bring forth distinct engagements with landscape, mythology, faith, human body, labour and everyday life. Whereas the human figuration becomes a site of social realities and emotional intensity, the abstraction engages with meditation, cosmology and the resonant, poetic and evocative possibilities of colour. Elsewhere, the materiality of surface, line and sculptural form gives shape to memory, displacement and interior worlds. Moving between village and metropolis, inherited traditions and international modernisms, the exhibition reveals a field defined by productive difference rather than any stylistic coherence or consensus. These artworks frame Indian modernism as a plural condition rooted in visual memory, reimagined through formal adventures and individual visions across generations and geographies.
