Standing tall, the magnificent Gulmohar provided cool shade and a resplendent display of bright orange-red blooms drooping from their slender branches.
Senior critic and curator Uma Nair looked up at them and blessed their abundance. So in her way, she decided to pay her respects to tress, that she sees as nature’s emblem of poise and perfection, through her art.
An exhibition was planned after a lot of brooding, conceptualising ‘Vriksha, A meditation and Celebration on the Eternal Power and Function of Trees’. The artwork for Vriksha speaks of trees in the natural and human worlds.
It’s a showcase of paintings, photographs, sculptures and ceramics by 30 artists. Within it are intaglios that have special importance for Nair as it was upon studying artist Jyoti Bhatt’s intaglios last year, that she started thinking about tress. “Bhatt gave me a few prints to examine. The more I delved into them, the more I knew I wanted his Kalpavriksha series as the core of my show,” says Nair.
In the exhibit, she has brought artist Arpana Caur Bones Prayer, a canvas of 2008, Jyoti Bhatt prints made in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Himmat Shah’s tree drawings, and contemporary artist Neeraj Goswami’s small paintings, in addition to others.
What struck most was acclaimed artist Seema Kohli’s Tree of Life sculpture, with its overtly feminine qualities, a characteristic of her style, nostalgic of art deco.
This piece is in bronze. Her work is inspired by the first verse, 15th Chapter of the Bhagwad Gita in which Krishna explains to Arjuna that life is like a Banyan tree.
He tells him that we are the creators of our existence by our actions and these actions are like the roots of the Banyan tree which add up to our karmas that entangle in the births-rebirths cycle.
The woman at its centre is the upholder of this karmic order.
The photographs section leads us to the work of late artist S Paul. In it, he has expressed the vision of a tree canopy.
Blurring the background, the focus is on the tress uncompromisingly. The colours are saturated making them glow with an ebullience, symbolic of their positive enrichment to the world. The canopies are formed in solidarity to provide a security blanket of shade.
There are three Gond artists in the show- Bajju Shyam, Venkat Shyam and Japani Shyam, in addition to others. All works in the exhibition share the prevailing sentiment that tress bare the burden of our existence and that we must become aware of that and respect their forbearance. “For me, it’s also the paradisal poise about them which is stirring,” she says, adding, “I want viewers to walk away pondering deeply about them. Vriksha is about listening to trees and thinking beyond ourselves. But at the moment, that’s far from reality,” she says.
On: Till July 12, At: IIC