Get set for a show of Bengal’s masters, ‘Bengal Beyond Boundaries’ — which will see works by both past and contemporary artists as Aakriti Art Gallery, between July 6 and 16, is bringing to Bikaner House in the national capital seminal works by Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Hemen Majumdar, Somnath Hore, Rabin Mondal, Ganesh Pyne, Arpita Singh, Jogen Chowdhury, Anjolie Ela Menon, Paresh Maity, and several others.
Conceptualised by artist Jogen Chowdhury and curated by Uma Nair, the exhibition seeks to place the history of the Bengal School as one that is born of the reflection of human understanding and affinity for a love of nature as well as the recording of human history through a fine selection of hand-picked works.
The show will have paintings, drawings, prints, as well as sculptures. Arranged in chronology, the exhibit exemplifies the ingenuity as well as the ethos of modern and contemporary art practices.
“A rank of works that transcend time the images of human figures as well as expressionist works will reflect the incessant human desire to explore the macrocosmic and the microcosmic through the experience of memory as well as history. These works will offer many journeys of discovery and contemplation and signify the enduring need for artists to provide a context and commentary around artistic journeys,” says curator Uma Nair.
The hallmark of the show will be the coming together of many big names in the art fraternity who have been practitioners for decades to young new upcoming talents.
The artists, printmakers, and sculptors have unravelled internal ‘journeys of discovery’ to provide an insight that focuses on the finest details of communication as well as the contemplative idiom in the creation of their own art. The show will include a quest that reaches out to capture the known as well as the unknown, it blends into a narrative of a prism of social, and cultural as well as a memoir of personal and public contemporary developments born out of the leaves of memory and Bengali heritage.
Divided into Bikaner House’s maze of galleries in the Centre for Contemporary Art, the show will feature the breadth of mediums artists worked within, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, and graphic works, as well as representations from Aakriti Art Gallery’s archival collection built up over decades.
From the early Kalighat mythic moorings to contemporary characters to the complexities of politics and power and faith and fervor this show is a novel look at present-day practices in the light of the past.
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