NYAB Event - "The Drawing Lab" Exhibition

"The Drawing Lab" Exhibition

Aicon Gallery

This event has ended.

The drawing lab is a monthly feature initiated for the budding collector. It provides an opportunity to collect rare pieces of work by master artists in Indian and Pakistani modern and contemporary art for under $5000. Works featured are from the collection of the artists and also often times from the Herwitz Collection; one of the most famous collections of Indian art outside India.

This month we feature three artists Ranbir Kaleka, Sanat Kar and Maneesha Parekh. The works of Kaleka and Parekh belong to the Herwtiz Collection and are rare works of an early vintage that are hard to come by.

Stylistically, the gentle, defined curvature of Sanat Kar's creaturely faces echo Bengali folk styles. At the same time, expressionist strains in Kar's works can evoke Edvard Munch. Soft, theatrical light and variations in hue invigorate a limited chromatic scale and create a distinct lyrical depth in Kar's work. He alludes to ideas about the afterlife, to an elusive distinction between life and death, conscious and unconscious. In the surrealistic world he concocts, ethereal, human-like beings inhabit allegories about the psyche and seem to be its rudiments anthropomorphized.

Ranbir Kaleka's work consists of deceptively simple, straightforward compositions that can be read as masking complex narratives with several layers of meaning. Using fluid lines combined with transparent and opaque colors, Kaleka creates views that defy perspective and gravity. Through an economy of means, Kaleka sets up a shifting interplay between abstract human forms and swathes of rich color through which one can extract the underlying thematic and emotional content of the scene.

The essence of Manisha Parekh's work has always been the fluid rhythmic structure she creates though her use of harmonious forms. In this group of calligraphic works, Parekh's signature preference for form and texture over color and tone reaches perhaps its purest manifestation. By experimenting with the density and opacity and of both ink and paper, Parekh explores the hidden animated life these overlooked substances take on when presented in their most stark and elementary of forms.