MYTHICAL MENAGERIE

                                        Recent Works by

                                           VIRAJ NAIK

                                          HONGKONG 

                                           May 9^th-12^th

DIPIKA BEDI

&

GALLERIA

invite you to the opening preview of

"HORIZON"

a solo exhibition by

BHAWANI KATOCH

April 18, 2008 to April 19, 2008

10 am-8 pm

At:

The Art House

1 The Old Parliament Lane, Singapore 179429

R.S.V.P

Dipika Bedi : 90114468

Ritu Prakash Desai : +91 98 200 49520

Galleria presents "The next Awakening"

Group Show of Nine Artists at IHC

26th to 29th Feb 2008

March 3rd to 15th at Galleria

c-11, Main Market, Vasant Vihar

New Delhi-110057

• Event Details : Nine blue chip artists of the future.
• This exhibition will showcase the growing maturity and inimitable styles of the participating artists – Raj Mohanty, Pradeep Puthoor, Paradosh Swain, Nandita Chowdhury, Falguni Gokhale, Mahua Sen, Roopa Shree, Rashmi Dogra and Veejayant Dash. These artists are from all over India, and their paintings reflect their individual sensibilities according to their location, background and experience. They use a variety of mediums like acrylics and oils on canvases and charcoal on paper.

• The Next Awakening is an exhibition that suggests a brave new terrain, where the poetry of visual arts is often completed in the imagination of the viewer. The Indian art scene against this backdrop is gaining new ground, signaling a whole new world of images, while retaining its cultural traditions.

• Curated by : Dr. Alka Pande
• Dr Alka Pande, currently Consultant Arts Advisor and Curator, Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, has been responsible for curating some of Delhi’s most unusual and perceptive shows in recent times. Dr Pande, formerly the Chairperson of the Department of Fine Arts, was also Visiting Faculty for Aesthetics at the College of Art and was also the Reader, Department of Fine Arts, Punjab University, Chandigarh, with a range of academic papers and lectures on diverse aspects of the arts to her credit. She has authored several books on art and art history, and has a special interest in ancient Indian erotic literature and art as well as gender and sexuality. She currently also offers art advisory services to corporates and individuals on art procurement and investment.

  Galleria presents "The Sacred"

Curated by Dr. Alka Pande

 at: THE MUSEUM GALLERY

K.DUBASH MARG, KALA GHODA

MUMBAI

The Sacred

"This is indeed India; the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a thousand nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterday bear date with the moldering antiquities of rest of nation - the one sole country under  the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for  alien  prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that  all men  desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would  no give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the  globe combined."

 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897.

One  of  India’s  greatest  gift  to  the  humanity  at  large  is  its  spiritual  base.  The  spirituality  of  India  having  a  distinct  and  separate  voice  of  a  religious  India.  Mark  Twain  foregrounded  this  aspect  of  India  way  back  in  1897.  But  I  go  back  even  more  in  time  when  I  pick  from  the  Yoga  Sutra  of  Patanjali  which  is  almost  2000  years  old.  In  the  compact  196  observations  on  the  nature  of  consciousness  and  liberations  the  Yoga  Sutra  becomes  increasingly  relevant  in  contemporary  times.  Though  brief,  the  Yoga  Sutra  manages  to  cut  to  the  heart  of  the  human  dilemma.  But  this  is one  of  the  texts  of  Indian  thought.  We  have  in  India  innumerable  texts  which  deal  with  the  many  aspects  of  India’s  Spiritual  ethos.

From  the  Vedas  which  is  the  wellspring  of  Indian  wisdom,  to  the  epics,  like  the  Mahabharata,  the  Ramayana,  to  the  Gita,  the  adoration  of  the  bhakti  poets  the  king  of  them  all  Jayadeva  who  with  a  single  work  the  Gita  Govinda  brought  in  Sringara  or  pleasure  into  bhakti  to  a  scale  unparalled. 

The  spirituality  of  India  has given the world philosophy, gyana  or  knowledge  rasa  or  flavour  , the concept of Shunya and Bindu and has transformed herself into a dizzying technological hub today of software, engineering, medicine and information technology.

From the pan Indian tradition of Vedic India where notions of aesthetics steps out from the precincts of vision and saundarya or  beauty to the vast expanse of woven folk and tribal traditions, to  contemporary fusions,  India abounds in  both.

From  transcendental consciousness and perfect bliss to the shrunken soul , from the sublime mountains the kulaparvatas to the intoxicant globalized cities, India is a centre of lurid realities and unrealities where there exists a peaceful balance between the many fractures.

A  nation which spans moments of time. From  Alladin’s lamp and Tigers and Elephants ,to mythic cultures and Cultural dialogues , From cultural transgressions , to religion bending , from ancient transcendental wisdom to new ageism. It is where tradition encounters modernity, where cultures fuse into newer ones , where identities  do not progress along a simple, straight line; where the ancient and cyber- space coexist , local traditions and newly designed spaces collide, and they allow contemporary art production , spiritual healing and body work, folk art and handicrafts, cinema and pop to coexist. Where progress itself is more than the sum of advancement.  Emerging as a multi-cultural,  multi-traditional India ,from a bowl of spiritual ideas, Buddhism, Gandhi Vedantic thought  to the largest bowl of technological outsourcing , to consumer markets. Modern India is a nauseating wonder between poverty and riches, characterizing herself in this  inherent duality and polarity of the spiritual and modern , India abounds in  many  moods and many flows.

The  exhibition---  The Sacred --  will  foreground  the  notions  of  philosophy,  beauty,  rituals  and  traditions,  where  spirituality  becomes  a  way  of  life.  It  is  in  India  bi  polarity, duality  multiple  religions  reside  with  complexity  and  simplicity.

Galleria presents an on line Exhibition of Paintings

By renowned women artists of India.

Arpana caur

Jayasri Burman

Sujata Bajaj

Shobha Broota

Rini Dhumal

Galleria invites you to view a recent collection of paintings by

BUWA SHETE

Meet the artist on 9th April,2007,6p.m onwards at Palm Court

India Habitat Center, Gate NO-2, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.

Exhibition will continue till the 12th April,2007 11a.m-7p.m

At Galleria from 14th April-30th April,2007 11a.m-7a.m

c-11,Main Market,Paschami Marg,Vasant Vihar, New Delhi-110057

“When the melody longs for lyrics

and lyric wraps around that melody

when a vrishka sings through its blossoms

and a lata tenderly winds around that vriksha

when chataka waits for a drop of rain

and rain comes down like a blessing from the sky

when charavaka calls for its mate

on the banks of the Ganga

and the mate respond and longs for union

when  purusha and prakriti seek each other

and finding themselves, rejoice

these are moments of romance.”

---Bharat  Satsai, 16^th century

The stirring of desire go back to antiquity. The earliest scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, have various sections devoted to love poetry making it an inevitable and an inherent part of the culture. In the Vedic hymns, the comparison of Usha, the Goddess of Dawn, (Rigveda) to a maiden who unveils her bosom to her lover, shows the erotic element so vividly and beautifully enmeshed in the ‘holy’ books. Erotic poetry finds its first expression in the love-charms of  Atharveda. Eros, the Greek God of Physical Desire, found a parallel in Cupid, the Roman God of Love. Its Indian resonance is found in Kama, the Indian God of Love.

This rich treasure of romantic poetry inspired artists to painting these words into visual poetry. The artist realized that the door to the intimate worlds of these paintings is through that richly evocative love poetry. He expressed the feeling of  ‘shringara’ though line and colour, symbols and motifs all portrayed within a sensitive approach. Expressing the most exalted of human emotions, that of romantic love between a man and a woman, a love that is richly sensual and yet serenely spiritual. Exploring with it a poetically elegant and richly sensuous female form.

Sensuality, desire, pleasure, celebration, love, romantic moments are all part of both the sacred and the profane in the Indian cultural framework. Kamasutra, the 4^th century Indian text, validates and affirms pleasure, sensuality and erotica. It has in many ways become the cannon for the understanding of Indian culture. There is an abundance of sacred literature of the Hindus, which is filled with the sacred lore’s palpitations of feminine dreams and themes gyrating with female fury.

Innumerable tales describe the feminine, there are the goddesses who strike their children with fever, nymphs who seduce sages, celestial virgins who run free in forests and chaste wives who fling themselves on funeral pyres to become guardians feminine virtue. In the domain of the ‘Riti  Kalin  Kavya’,  medieval Bhakti poetry and ‘Saundarya Lahiri’, the feminine has been adored, loved and worshipped. The pursuit of external beauty is narrated, where verses on women described them as a haunting melody and glorious sunset.

As we scroll through the world map, desire, erotic pleasure finds an important and significant emphasis in the cultural ethos of all ancient civilizations. The translations of erotic symbols from different cultures are then carried forward through artists and thinkers.

This exhibition attempts to address the celebration of sensuality, which has been part and parcel of he Indian consciousness since the dawn of civilizations. Through the works of contemporary artists, the exhibition attempts to address the continuous mappings of sensuality, sexuality and desire.

Dr. Alka Pande