Dimorestudio
At Dimorecentrale, the new multi-purpose space by Dimorestudio — one of Europe’s most in-demand design companies — there were a number of stunning exhibits. From Bonacina 1889’s rattan furniture to French fashion maison Yves Salomon’s debut furniture collection, in collaboration with Chapo Création. But Dimorestudio’s co-founder Emiliano Salci’s ‘Limited Edition’ stood out. For the seven-piece collection, the Italian designer revived and contemporarised classic pieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Think a chest of drawers with an organ (keyboard) shaped backrest in veneered boxwood or a lacquered wood sideboard with the base in brushed steel. All the pieces were deconstructed and reassembled, with modern accessories and lacquers in brass, gold and steel. Each piece came personally signed by Salci. uring my visit to the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), a day after the opening of K.G. Subramanyan’s retrospective at Emami Art, I hear several stories about the renowned artist. Mani da, as he was a¥ectionately known, “had a sweet tooth”, says Chaiti Nath, a programme executive at KCC. “A colleague used to bake cakes for him every weekend in Shantiniketan. Even though I only met him when he was already ‘KG’ [shortened from Kalpathi Ganpathi], and he would come for lectures surrounded by people, he was always nice to me. He even did a quick sketch in my notebook once.”
Subramanyan, it seems, gave away his art to everyone — many of those who studied in Shantiniketan or visited the institution had received works from him. “Even then, there was enough artwork for so many retrospectives [like this one
Dto mark the Keralaborn Tamil Brahmin’s centenary birth anniversary],” adds Nath. Another person tells me that the late artist, who passed away in 2016, had a caustic sense of humour.
I seem to nd mentions of KG everywhere I turn in Kolkata. Serendipitously, there are references to him even in Holding Time Captive, the biography of theatre persona and art collector Ebrahim Alkazi that I’m engrossed in. This comes as a surprise because I associate Alkazi with the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and KG had his roots rmly in
Shantiniketan and folk arts such as patachitra. They seem miles away from each other, but a Kolkata friend tells me that Alkazi helped KG travel to England as a Fellow at the prestigious St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in the 1980s.
Painter, activist, teacher
KG experimented with a range of materials as well as themes. Over the 70odd years of his career, he was a painter, printmaker, author, toy maker, muralist, and relief sculptor who made signicant contributions to institutions such as the AllIndia Handloom Board and the World Craft Council Board. He remained an activist, institution builder, and teacher till the end of his life both at Shantiniketan and Maharaja Sayajirao University
(MSU) in Baroda.
This exhibition, One Hundred Years and Counting: Re-Scripting KG Subramanyan — which has over 200 works curated by cultural theorist Nancy Adajania from the collections of Seagull Foundation, MSU, and Asia Art Archive — looks at KG’s large repository of work. As Adajania explains, this includes his “early paintings from the 1950s; iconic reverse paintings on acrylic, which look like polychrome stained glass windows; marker pen works on paper; postcardsize drawings from his visit to China; and toys made for the ne arts fairs”. It also
(Clockwise from above) The Reaper; reverse paintings on acrylic at Emami Art; K.G. Subramanyan preparing for a puppet show in 1968; toys made by the artist. has neverseen archival material such as handcrafted mockups of his children’s books and preparatory sketches for murals. The maquettes of his nal mural, the massive 2.7 x 10.9metre, blackandwhite acrylic on canvas called The War of the Relics (2013), which uses motifs from myth and contemporary culture to show the medieval mindset of human confrontation, are stunning. KG was 88 and had just had major surgery when he decided to make the huge piece.
Telling it like it is
But KG’s activist mindset didn’t just extend to the grandiose. My favourite part of the exhibition is a children’s book that is a thinly explores his ideological a°nity with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, who have “all been neutralised as icons, emptied of content or vilied”. As she puts it, it is interesting to see a resurgence of the legacy of “arguably the most popular and relevant artist and teacher of independent India” through exhibitions across Mumbai, Vadodra and Kolkata, when the legacy of his peers is being extinguished.
Till June 21 at Emami Art, Kolkata
Centre for Creativity.
The writer is an expert on South Asian art and culture.