Points of Departure
Modern Art Gallery presents Points of Departure, a curated selection of artworks by six artists, spanning 50 years of practice. The exhibit is framed as a conversation between artworks made on issues of the contemporary from varied lenses and by artists working across generations. They offer insights into our fast-mutating ecologies, centering the tension between the artists' desire to capture reality while negotiating the impossibility of objective truth.
Tsering Negi’s intricate and ultra-composed portraits in woodcut signal the interlinked fates of man and nature. K Pooja’s etchings of upside-down bazaars offer an intimate insight into the artist’s observations of the city and its people. Both, in their unique ways, offer archival possibilities for documenting migration of lives that disappear too easily in the chaos of an urban milieu.
Paresh Maity’s masterful watercolours depict nature at its idyllic best, in a utopic imagery of a pristine riverside or a mountain peak at twilight. These stand in stark contrast with the vast, muted and oft desolate landscapes by Rachna Badrakia, where nature seems to have bent its knee to human will. The grid-like texturisations of Krishna Reddy’s prints echo construction sites, while Tsering’s lithographs of the Himachali countryside serve as sobering reminders of all that is at stake, foregrounding our rapid acceleration into an ecological Armageddon.
There is a dreamy escapist quality to the charcoal drawings of Goan artist Diptej Vernekar. Guided by errors, Diptej uses the technique of erasure as a way of revealing; his works speak to the fluidity of memory, which is often in flux with our need to constantly find meaning.
While the works presented may be generations apart, their pre-occupations appear to collide and, in turn, offer us a space of quiet reflection—for futures to come and of the pasts we inherit.
Tsering Negi’s intricate and ultra-composed portraits in woodcut signal the interlinked fates of man and nature. K Pooja’s etchings of upside-down bazaars offer an intimate insight into the artist’s observations of the city and its people. Both, in their unique ways, offer archival possibilities for documenting migration of lives that disappear too easily in the chaos of an urban milieu.
Paresh Maity’s masterful watercolours depict nature at its idyllic best, in a utopic imagery of a pristine riverside or a mountain peak at twilight. These stand in stark contrast with the vast, muted and oft desolate landscapes by Rachna Badrakia, where nature seems to have bent its knee to human will. The grid-like texturisations of Krishna Reddy’s prints echo construction sites, while Tsering’s lithographs of the Himachali countryside serve as sobering reminders of all that is at stake, foregrounding our rapid acceleration into an ecological Armageddon.
There is a dreamy escapist quality to the charcoal drawings of Goan artist Diptej Vernekar. Guided by errors, Diptej uses the technique of erasure as a way of revealing; his works speak to the fluidity of memory, which is often in flux with our need to constantly find meaning.
While the works presented may be generations apart, their pre-occupations appear to collide and, in turn, offer us a space of quiet reflection—for futures to come and of the pasts we inherit.