Gallery 1000A’s latest exhibition Transition — A Visual Story: 2020 is based on the concept of transition. The show featuring artists Binoy Varghese and Nupur Kundu, urges people look deep within. Simultaneously, it aims to narrate the startling layers of experiences in the changing world.
Kundu calls her displayed paintings, #QuarantineScapes. She painted these abstract landscapes in oils during the 2020 lockdown.
“This forced downtime gave me a lot of time to introspect and spend inside my studio like never before. Being in the studio and spending long hours on my own... alone has never been new. Yet, this felt new for me,” she says.
The forced isolation and attached realisations transpired in her practice and completely changed her paintings.
“These works are from my quarantine environment, where there is hope to reach out to that landscape and outdoors, which one always took for so much granted. To breathe in that fresh environment without that scare of the virus being around us all the time.” She will also exhibit works from her spiritual series #Ode2India titled AUM and Swas Chakra.
Binoy Varghese deals with social justice themes in his art. “Racism, casteism and communal violence are the ways of the ones who have an upper hand in society. It’s time to give the next generation a better future. As an artist and a social democrat, I would create through my pallet a voice for the voiceless, support for the ignorant, and a voice against racism. And ensure my support through my colours, lines, and be with them,” he says.
Varghese’s experience in the film industry and as a poster artist shows in his informed approach to painting. His photorealist paintings borrow from photography, cinema and digital media, while the subject matter largely focuses on women and children against busy, colourful backdrops.
He says, “The imageries of deserted landscapes are sublime narrations of the exodus of human inhabitants of past and the present. Multiple hues in the works take the voices of the oppressed. The earthy elements represent the voiceless, vulnerable and the marginalised.”