SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: Hyderabad does not often get an art exhibition of this calibre. Shows that bring together the biggest names in modern Indian art usually stay in Mumbai and Delhi. If you want to see an MF Husain or an Amrita Sher-Gil up close, you generally have to travel for it.
This weekend, you don’t.
ShowKeen, an exhibition by the Mumbai auction house AstaGuru, opened at the Hitex Exhibition Centre on Saturday, October 17. It has been held in Mumbai and Delhi before, but this is its first time in Hyderabad, and it ends on Sunday, October 18.
The show features 33 artists. Apart from Sher-Gil and Husain, there are SH Raza, FN Souza, Krishen Khanna and Bikash Bhattacharjee, painters whose work usually turns up in museums and auction catalogues. Most of what is on display is not for sale. The pieces that are range from about Rs 6 lakh to Rs 35 crore, and the most expensive is a Husain.
You don’t need to know much about art to enjoy it.
MF Husain
Husain gets the most wall space. The largest of his works is a huge black-and-white canvas of dancing women, a man playing the flute and a row of women with their heads covered. There is also one of his Mother Teresa paintings. As in most of the ones he made of her, she has no face. You know who she is from the white sari with the blue border.
His other paintings here are in bright yellows and blues.
Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil died in 1941, aged 28, and her paintings now sell for record prices. The Sher-Gil works at ShowKeen are not the famous ones. They are small drawings and a portrait from around 1930, when she was a teenager studying art in Paris.
There is a charcoal sketch of a young woman with short hair and a small drawing of a woman by the sea. The oil portrait is of a red-haired woman in a red dress with a long string of pearls. The drawings are small and easy to miss, but if you have only seen Sher-Gil in books, give them a few minutes.
Two painters from Karimnagar
Two of the artists are from Karimnagar district. Thota Vaikuntam was born in 1942 in Burugupalli village, studied art in Hyderabad and still lives in the city. He is known for his paintings of Telangana village women, and many of them hang side by side here. One is wearing a blue sari and one in green, against a yellow background. There is also his 1994 painting of a flute player.
PT Reddy was born in 1915 in Annaram village. In 1941, he and a few other young artists in Mumbai formed a group to make modern art, six years before the better-known Progressive Artists’ Group. He later moved to Hyderabad. His 1956 painting of a crowded street is done in thick layers of orange and yellow paint.
More to look out for
Kolkata painter Bikash Bhattacharjee painted pictures that look almost like photographs. In the largest of his four works here, an older woman in a white sari looks straight out of the canvas, a child peeps in from the bottom and a young woman stands at a doorway with her back to us. It is a strange scene and hard to stop looking at.
SH Raza has paintings here too, two of them made 27 years apart. The 1971 one is a burst of reds and oranges. The 1998 one has the circles and triangles he became known for. Krishen Khanna, who turned 100 last year, has a painting of a band musician in orange against a dark blue background.
Bansi Parimu, a Kashmiri painter, has a 1991 canvas of faces seen through streaks of red paint. He made it in the last year of his life, a year after he left Kashmir during the Pandit exodus.
The newest piece in the show was made this year: a cheetah by Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, embroidered in silk thread on a background of painted butterflies.
Go before it closes
It is not every day that Hyderabad gets to see this many important Indian artists in one place. Many of these works are rarely shown in public, and there is no telling when they will be seen here again. If you have any interest in art, make time for it on Sunday.
ShowKeen is on at the Hitex Exhibition Centre until Sunday, October 18, from 11 am to 7 pm.
SOURCE : SIASAT
