Must see -art heritage: iaf

A cornucopia of colours and styles meet your eyes at Art Heritage Booth B 10 – Art Heritage has impeccable history with its founder Ebrahim Alkazi, a veritable czar in the world of contemporary art. At the IAF they have a mélange of mesmeric works by Gauri Vemula, Jai Zharotia and Sunanda Khajuria.

Vemula's Ganapati is a vivid pen and ink drawing that is at once dense and deeply enriched by her skilled use of pen and ink to give us a spiritual mosaic that entices and enchants. It is the density of her detailing and her treatment that makes it look like a surreal landscape with mythic figuratives, animals and human figures as well as magical objects and motifs from the natural world.

Her second work with pencil, pen and ink looks like a choregraphy from the Zodiac with an alluring ram that draws substantial influence from the mythic/astrological visual lexicon, but her strength lies in the iconography as well as imagined landscape of both unreal animal as well as objects.

Jai Zharotia's diptych draws our attention to multiple motifs which Zharotia forges with his array of characters to create his own idiom by placing them in a contemporary context. If Zharotia gives us a delicate balancing of the images then Sunanda Khajuria's journey to the east conjures the amalgamation of reality and fantasy; mellifluous and magical and hope and desire. With an eagle eye on emotional and psychological states of human nature, Khajuria draws inspiration from her experiences in these diverse locales that aid in her exploration of the possibilities of the visual language. Her treatment of contours and the juxtaposition of both colour and translucent techniques in her work 'search for the truth' , keeps her work at another realm of sophistication.

Khajuria's earlier work, a culmination of her residencies and travels, reflect her movement through new cultural and geographic terrains. Her introspective series 'world of dreams', delved deeply into personal memories, transforming them through her work, with herself as the protagonist or optical centre of the painting. In this series, she selects motifs from memory, infusing them with inferences from the present in an amalgamation of past and present, urban and rural, using an unorthodox, yet clever colour palette.

Moving Landscapes, her most recent solo show held at Art Heritage, was the conclusion of her experiences with different times and places that she explored during her travels in Asian countries. With these works, at the IAF, Khajuria shows how she is deeply immersed in Chinese culture, tradition and language.

This engagement has been most beneficial for her own understanding into the exploring of investigations and ideas.

An MFA from College of Art Delhi, she participated in an Advance Research Program at the China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, China, where she also learnt the Chinese language and Chinese traditional art. She started her advanced research on Chinese Traditional Painting and Calligraphy at China Academy of Fine Art.

She quickly engaged in international art residencies and projects from diverse countries including Australia, Italy, Russia and China.

IAF 2018 opens on February 9, 2018.

(The above mentioned story is part of the series on India Art Fair, 2018, which will be carried till the fair ends.)