It has been a personal milestone for husband and wife duo Keshav Mahendru and Dhwani Gudka as they opened the doors to Subcontinent, Mumbai’s new art address, to the public recently with a show dedicated to the late Haku Shah. For the gallery’s founders, there couldn’t have been a better subject for an inaugural exhibition than Shah (1934-2019), who, apart from being a pioneering artist, was also an ethnographer, archivist, humanist and a pedagogue. “Haku Shah is one of these lynchpin figures in Indian modern art and yet, he doesn’t seem to have a solidified place in the canon because his work and ideology defies easy categorisation,” says Mahendru.
Curated by Jesal Thacker, Ya Ghat Bheetar/Rediscovering Form was Shah’s first major exhibition in Mumbai in over a decade and it explored his long and protean artistic practice, pivoting around his preoccupation with the feminine form as an embodiment of Mother Earth. The title of the exhibition was drawn from one of Shah’s emblematic paintings which itself was inspired by Kabir’s iconic poem.
Mahendru and Gudka first met at an art gathering. They are interested in taking on what they call the “big history of Indian art and culture”—transcending the age-old categories of ‘classical’, ‘modern’, and ‘contemporary’ to fill the gap in legacies largely ignored by South Asian art history. A Duke University graduate, Mahendru grew up in Delhi, developing an early interest in art. He started visiting galleries in his teens, getting an opportunity to meet masters like Ram Kumar and A Ramachandran and collecting a work by Shilpa Gupta when he was barely 15.
Gudka, on the other hand, is a Mumbai girl who has had stints at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum, Christie’s and Saffronart, where she worked as an antiquity specialist. With Subcontinent, the couple hopes to have “fewer, but longer term shows every year. Alongside the programming, we want to focus on publishing and pedagogy as I feel nothing can match the impact of a scholarly book,” Gudka insists, holding up Shah’s 1985 tome Form and Many Forms of Mother Clay to make her point.