at KNMA Saket
Preview: 26 July 2024 | 6:30 pm onwards
Public Viewing: 27 July 2024 onwards | 10:30 am – 6:30 pm
Closed on Mondays and National Holidays
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is delighted to present two distinct artistic practices with pronounced styles and rich imagery, in the works of artists Amitava and Mohan Samant. The two exhibitions will stand independently while conversing with each other through cursors of art-making and ingenious journeys of the two artists. The practices of Mohan Samant (1924 – 2004) and Amitava (b.1947) speak of creative inclinations of two distinct generations. In terms of engagement with the material, both Amitava and Samant have displayed unquestioned mastery in their individual trajectories, which have resulted in the most astonishing emergence of forms and figurations on pictorial surfaces.
The exhibition If We Knew the Point – Amitava draws from an array of styles and references which are emerging points of Amitava ‘s images. Cruising between a wide range of mediums from graphite, ink, ballpoint pens, watercolour, and collages to making burnt marks on paper, he treats the illustrative ground through the poetics of materiality. Often unwilling to rationalize the meaning behind art making, he emphasises the statement that ‘art is to be experienced’ and not reasoned out.
Recalling Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetics- In Search of Duende, and the related notions portrayed by Lorca as a forceful energy containing irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death,
Amitava’s images flourish on the abstract edge of creative balance between visual art, music, cinema
and poetry. The interplay of forms, from liminal figures of humans and animals, appropriations from
nature to the geometrics of urbanity, populate a wide range of surfaces, from sketchbook papers,
and canvases to handmade rice paper, that Amitava chooses.
With more than 150 artworks the exhibition will explore the diversity of forms, colours, textures, and
surfaces that evoke a multitude of emotions. The exhibition title is both a somatic and rhetorical
coinage, drawing from the eponymous poem by Roberto Juarroz. The term ‘point’ comprehends an
array of meanings, on one hand, it means a particular fact, idea, or opinion that somebody
expresses, or a primary piece of information, while it also means a statement or an objective.
On the other hand, ‘point’ or a dot is an essential unit of making art, which reminds us of a range of
art terminologies from ‘pointillism’ (art movement) to the dots used in various indigenous art forms.
Amitava uses these elements (dots or points) with precise objectives to impart definitive volume and
impact in his forms. One finds thousands of these dots or points that make his images incisive,
providing them with both formalistic and conceptual advantages. Filigree-like entwining, minimal
geometric space formations are a few signifiers that mark his signature style. Speaking of poetry, and
space making while involved in exhibition designing and his general inclination towards design
elements, Amitava uses curious objects like price tags, bus tickets and other ephemera on the
artworks as reminiscences of his travels, a mnemonic archive, and as take-off points for his
imagination to excavate formalistic possibilities in his art.
The exhibition will unfold elements of surprise on display while unfolding Amitava’s varied and subtle
interpretations of cultural stigmata which are interwoven within a collective cultural identity,
something he has absorbed and released.
The second exhibition Magic in the Square – Mohan Samant, Centennial Exhibition, is a crisp
exploration of Samant’s practice, which is also a tribute to the artist. Mohan Samant was part of the
Progressive Artists Group (PAG) and carried the dynamism of the spirit of that age. Unique in his
approach, Samant’s practice stood apart from the stylistic language of the PAG peers. Samant is one
of the modern Indian painters to be trained in India and become successful in the West following
India’s independence. He has been dubbed as “one of the few artists who has successfully made the
bridge between Eastern and Western traditions.”
Having spent most of his life in New York, Samant’s practice is a classic instance of the strong
ingrained roots to the homeland despite having migrated to a different hemisphere, amidst a
different culture. Revisiting Mohan Samant while reading his unorthodox approach in transliterating
through a set of personal iconographies that would indicate a less-spoken chapter in the national
history of art. He was one of the earliest examples of a transcultural person, freed from the
incapacitating logic of stylistic doctrine through which often the modernist-nationalist narrative is
studied, as poignantly termed by Homi K. Bhabha, he was a dweller of the in-between.
Growing up in the vibrant city of Bombay (now Mumbai), Samant was exposed to the realism of
reproduction of Ravi Varma’s paintings at a tender age alongside his mother’s efforts in the crafts.
Later on, training at the JJ School of Arts, and tutelage under Shankar Balwant Palsikar, introduced
him to indigenous art styles like Basholi which left an ineffaceable mark on his creative subconscious.
Simultaneously the Abstract expressionism that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in New York,
opened new approaches to experimenting with methods, language, scale and medium. Samant
configured a style that incorporated and experimented with possibilities of materials, apart from
regular paint he started using cement, plastic, sand, and thread, eventually layering his pictorial
ground with cut-out forms and figurines. He raised these cut-outs from the primary surface, thus
giving his paintings a three-dimensional effect. They are neither relief nor flat, this in-betweenness,
perhaps is an adroit extension of his skills as a Sarangi player. The abstract nuance of classical music
is translated in a subtle daintiness on his canvases.
The exhibition Magic in the Square is a nonliteral elucidation, drawn from the title of one of his
artworks. With 20 works of Mohan Samant from the KNMA collection and other collections,
synchronizing with the poetic deliberations of Amitava, the exhibition explores the ‘intermediary’
transmissions in consciousness that flow freely from one creative field to another, from poetry to
image to music.
KNMA Chairperson and Founder Kiran Nadar said, “We are delighted to present Amitava and
Mohan Samant with their solo shows at KNMA. For viewers, this will be a rare opportunity to engage
with the under-represented but extraordinary practice of Mohan Samant in his centennial year.
Samant moved to New York, but his art created a stir wherever it was displayed. The exhibition for
the first time also displays the four works that were gifted to the museum by the generous gesture of
Samant’s family, especially his wife Jillian Samant. The second solo is of Amitava whose artistic
practice is an exciting one as it collapses boundaries between artistic categories and creates a distinct
visual language that is cryptic and contemporary.”
Roobina Karode, Director and Chief Curator, KNMA adds, “The solo exhibitions of Amitava and
Mohan Samant’s at KNMA are conceptualized around their artistic preoccupations of disrupting the
long tradition of medium-specific practice that they were initiated in, freeing themselves to expand
their consciousness to divergent conceptual ideas, materials, media, discard /trash, playing upon
assimilations, both coherent and absurd, creating multiple layers within a single frame. Amitava and
Samant in different contexts and locations tend to converse around inventing a language of pictorial
construction, collaging, armaturing and assemblaging, creating extra dimensions through cut-outs,
paper shreds and threads, fragments of objects, toys, markings along with color pigment, pencil
scribbles, inks and markers. While Mohan Samant excavates sedimented memory, fossil-like forms
and totemic imagery from his sand, dust and gravel layers, Amitava restores his journey having
archived the self, gathering mementos and ephemera across geographies, histories, poetry and
literature, juxtaposed with scribbles and colours, in tune with sounds and silence.”
