BENGALURU: What do you do when you visit a place so beautiful that photographs don’t do justice to it? Hungarian artist Ildikó Morovszki-Halász faced a similar situation and hence took to painting to express the colours of India through aquarelle on paper and acryl on canvas. Her experiences and inspiration from the works of artist Amrita Sher-Gil resulted in the exhibition ‘In the wake of Amrita Sher-Gil’, where Morovszki-Halász displays her paintings in Bengaluru for the first time.
The collection is a series of paintings such as Dancers and Drummers, Portraits, Holy Bath, Naked Reality, Headkerchief, Water Carriers and Poverty dreams. The artist says she’s fascinated by the colours Sher-Gil used when expressing the ‘colorfulness of the Indian reality’. “She opened my own ‘artistic vision on India’. She was the master reminding me that art should not be compromised to satisfy the ‘taste of the market’”, she explains.
Morovszki-Halász says Sher-Gil and her are both women artists who were born in Hungary. “We both decided to express the beauty of India through paintings. Since she has been my inspiration, I chose to name the exhibition ‘In the wake of Amrita Sher-Gil’,” she reveals.
Finding inspiration in India
For the last four years, she has been travelling to different parts of India with her family and also interacted extensively with locals. Morovszki-Halász recalls how she joined fishermen in Kerala to experience fishing. “They let me pull the nets with them. My husband was shocked to see me do it. I have just decided that my next series will be dedicated to the fishermen of Kerala,” she says.
When inspired by a certain situation, face or movement, she usually takes photos that will later remind her about the situation. These photos serve two goals, she says. “It develops the major ‘concept’ for my next series, the concept usually being what I learned when interacting with these people and what I want to say with these pictures,” she says, adding that the photos are just reminders for her when painting the themes but are never copied as is on canvas.
The paintings are on display at Art@ L1, JW Marriott Hotel Bengaluru, till March 31.