This photocollage, Keep Slim (or, as Abby Grey titled it, Keep Slim with Limical), is steeped in wry allusion: Sundaram juxtaposes a cutout magazine photograph of a statue of a fecund female, perhaps a yakshi of the kind seen in Hindu temples, with a slender woman clad in a sari. At the right are the […]
In Old Delhi, Menon obscures her subject under multiple paint layers, requiring the viewer to peer through a rough patina in order to excavate the composition and discern the hazy images. Key forms such as domes or turrets conjure a monument, perhaps Delhi’s famed mosque, Jama Masjid. Born in West Bengal, Menon is a post-independence […]
A leader of India’s modernist movement, Khanna is an avid proponent of modernism as a universal art form. In Vijay he draws from the Japanese tradition of sumi-e, or black ink on paper. Channeling the ink wash, he courts accident to produce dark atmospheric forms reduced to their essences, a technique that evokes a sense […]
In Shepherd, Hore strains, contorts, and abstracts elements of the human form, violently representing what he views as the abjectness of the human condition. Although he employs the pastoral trope of the peasant, the figure is neither nostalgic nor romanticized. Rather, the skeletal shepherd—seen bending over a dead farm animal in a brown, fallow field—buckles […]
Better known as an art critic and historian, Appasamy worked briefly as an artist, painting mostly landscapes. As chair of the arts organization Delhi Silpi Chakra (Delhi Sculptors’ Circle), she resisted contemporary efforts to create an Indian national art. She saw modernism as the confluence of a range of artistic traditions, not a novel form […]
Recognized as the first modern ceramicist in Turkey, Füreya (who is known by her first name) was a trailblazer. Beginning her career as an artist at the age of 40, she made it her mission to transform the inheritance of çini, the 16th-century Ottoman decorative ceramic-tile tradition, into a public-oriented, modernist practice for synthesizing art […]
Islek was born in Tekirdag, in northern Thrace. A published writer of short stories and poetry as well as an artist, Islek took private classes from Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu for several years in the mid-1960s and participated in various local group exhibitions—but ultimately decided not to pursue a career as an artist. Mrs. Grey must […]