HYDERABAD: Artist Koeli Mukherjee Ghose is known for using pastel shades in her canvases. But of late the subtle hues are bursting with a plethora of colours while the lines become bolder and the sweeps turn deeper. The artist evolves as does her presentation. She introduced her exhibition ‘Crux’ at Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad with an oral narrative. She sat there knitting and singing Celtic songs later replacing the act with the story of a wizard written by the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa defining the different roles a woman switches to. Says Koeli, “I did this as an art performance to experience the multiple skills a woman integrates to reinstate the bonding in her environment.”
Varied facets of a woman emerges through several brush strokes. The woman in Koeli’s canvases works incessantly sometimes rocking a baby in her hands, sewing a piece of cloth. Quite interestingly, in several of the canvases a yogini appears in the background subtly without disturbing the cosmos of dots. The colours separate this figure. But why does she appear at all? Well, Koeli regularly practises yoga and it is the other free self of the woman who stays within the painting frame to connect with the woman losing her deeper ‘self’ in the din of daily life. The artist also splashes a lot of colours to introduce the mundane life of woman to a world where millions of drops conspire with each other to pour colours into this woman’s life. And this is where the success of the artist lies.
The exhibition is on till today
— Saima Afreen
saima@newindianexpress
@Sfreen