Celebrating their 10th anniversary, the Shrishti art gallery is hosting the exhibition, titled ‘Women: Sacred and the Temporal’. Hosting 10 women artists from across the country, the exhibition tries to capture some of the essence that becomes a women.
The collection features names like Arpana Caur, Anjolie Ela Menon, Seema Kohli, Kavita Deuskar and Rekha Rao among the others. With about 15 paintings on display and a sole bronze sculpture, the exhibition, though does give a taste of the many, can seem a bit repetitive in its theme.
Considering that it was scheduled on the heels of Women’s day, the spirit of singing about women doesn’t quite come through. But that isn’t to say that the paintings aren’t exemplary in their own right. The gallery has brought together a nice mix of reputed artists like Arpana Caur (who incidentally has the highest priced paintings) and relatively nouveau painters like Anjani Reddy. Reflecting the different aspects of the female, the canvases are done in different mediums, capturing the different moods. To mention a few, Kavita Deuskar’s mixed media shows a multi-hand village belle of sorts, which perhaps tries to convey the strong rustic rural women who handles the fields, the children and probably a drunk husband.
Jayasri Burman’s painting shoes the deity Ganesh with presumably his mother Goddess Parvathi - a painting with a colourful explosion of hues with finely painted motifs on the garments. Asma Menon’s canvases stand out from the crowd with their bright red acrylic borders and black sketched subjects. With one scene broken into windows that are delicately detailed with elements of nature, her works gives one a lot to absorb and appreciate.
Arpana Caur sticks to contemporary abstract art in which one of her canvases features a vertical semi-bodied woman holding a pot accompanied by an equally semi-bodied companion.
Dark and mystical, the black background which are broken by colours including mustard, white and red, make the relief work seem all the more loud. As a tryst with numbers, the show was inaugurated on March 10 and will go on till March 30. The paintings range between `40,000 to about `9 lakhs, the average price being `2.5 - `3 lakhs.