BREATH OF FRESH ART
Exhibited together at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art, the works of K. Ramanujam and Atul Dodiya are a sight for sore eyes At the KNMA’S twin exhibition, K. Ramanujam’s works create an irreverent dystopia while Atul Dodiya’s watercolours reveal a
After more than two years of looking at art mostly on computer screens, the opening of the refurbished Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art (KNMA) is a welcome event. The museum opens with a twin exhibition: the works of K. Ramanujam (1941-1973), being shown in depth for the first time outside Tamil Nadu as well as a display of recent work by one of our most important contemporary painters, Atul Dodiya.
Screen fatigue notwithstanding, as you walk into the renovated foyer, you have on one wall a digital mosaic of works from KNMA’s vast collection of modern and contemporary Indian art. As you tap or swipe on a particular image, it enlarges out of the cluster, allowing you to look at the painting or sculpture in greater detail, complete with the name of the artist and year of making. This display itself (with its ‘touch’ capability) could happily occupy a visitor for a couple of hours, but just beyond the foyer beckon real walls with real paintings.
Ramanujam, who lived and worked in Madras, was a brilliant artist who led a troubled life and died young, committing suicide at the age of 32. It is typical of our north Indian bias that his name and some of his images have kept coming and going as though a scudding cloud, from the periphery of our vision. In Roobina Karode’s display, we are invited to engage with a startling eye, hand and mind, the pictures ranging from a large batik painting and a scroll several feet long, to two sides of a torn diary page. The imagery—a lot of it monochromatic in black ink—effortlessly creates an irreverent dystopia of gods and goddesses, creatures and temples, punctuated occasionally with quotidian caricatures and figures from a 1960s that runs parallel to whatever is going on up north in India, in Europe and the US.
When the lockdown was announced in March 2020, Dodiya realised he would not be able to get to his studio for some time. So he grabbed whatever pads and paints he could and came home. During the isolation brought about by Covid, Dodiya worked in his Ghatkopar flat, producing at least one water-colour painting a day, most of them just a little bigger than A4. Over 300 paintings were made, from which he and Karode chose over a hundred for this show.
One of the joys of seeing actual work is you can go close and notice things, for instance, how thin the paper is in many of these paintings. Both Atul and his wife Anju have worked extensively in watercolour, usually on thick paper that holds the colours and brush marks with some authority, but here the lighter weight drawing paper crimples under paint in places, warps at other points under the onslaught of a wash. As
Dodiya says, in the twist of the past two years, all this didn’t matter; he just drew and painted as his hand and mind took him, enjoying the limitations of the paper, divesting himself of the things that would normally be on his radar, like a target exhibition, or what imagery he was referencing from the world of art, or about how the work fitted—or didn’t—with what he had done earlier.
What we see then, is both playful and mournful, whimsical yet oddly rigorous in its repetitions: figures in landscapes, figures on boats, boats on the back of figures, boats within boats; trees with holes; figures that glancingly remind one of those painted by Tagore; implied light from a Rabindric monsoon; the images making light hand-claps with both Rabindranath and Ramanujan before continuing on their very different journeys.
Go and see this twin show if you can, and keep an eye out for KNMA opening their other galleries across April and following months.
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