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Shaped By Her Encounters

Shaped By Her Encounters

Ela Das for Aban Raza

February 5th, 2024

Artist Aban Raza, who will receive the Asia Arts Future (India) Award at the India Art Fair, has been documenting events - protests and communal attacks - as they have been unfolding in the country

 

The Double Life of Aji V.N.'s Art

The Double Life of Aji V.N.'s Art

John Yau for Hyperallergic

Aji’s bifurcated practice reflects his experience of living and working in two different worlds, India and the Netherlands.

It shouldn't be so arresting but it is! | Abir Karmakar

It shouldn't be so arresting but it is! | Abir Karmakar

QUASAR THAKORE PADAMSEE for Art India

Moving through Abir Karmakar's Passages, QUASAR THAKORE PADAMSEE maintains that we are never just one thing.

Sangram Majumdar by Melissa Joseph | BOMB MAG

Sangram Majumdar by Melissa Joseph | BOMB MAG

Painting that manifests an environment

I’m not sure one can pinpoint where Sangram Majumdar’s paintings live, but he isn’t asking us to. He once described his process as a room of chain-smokers creating an atmosphere from which the paintings emerge. This beautiful and mysterious visual stays with me as we discuss his first solo show in India, somewhere elsewhere, at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai. At every moment we’re compelled to engage with the work as if seeking a friendly visage through a haze. One might eke out a nose or an eye, only for it to disappear, leaving a haunting sensation of the familiar. In a previous review of Majumdar’s work, John Yau called it “necessary ambiguity.” I call it good painting.

—Melissa Joseph

DestinAsian Magazine | Ratheesh T

DestinAsian Magazine | Ratheesh T

In 2003, prominent art dealer Usha Mirchandani and her daughter Ranjana opened Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Colaba, just behind The Taj Mahal Palace hotel, and began working with a circle of emerging young talents who are now significant names in the Indian art scene. Last year, the gallery relocated to a 460-square-meter space inside a stone-clad heritage building in Fort’s Ballard Estate, where it continues to rep some of the country’s most sought- after contemporary artists. The beautiful, light-filled viewing room makes this a superlative experience for art aficionados (galeriems.com).

11 art exhibits not to miss at Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2024

11 art exhibits not to miss at Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2024

By Sridevi Nambiar for AD

11 to 14 January 2024

“We wanted to present something completely new for Mumbai Gallery Weekend,” says Ranjana Steinruecke, Director at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, which will be hosting Seattle-based Sangram Majumdar’s first solo show in India.

Observing Kilimanoor | Ratheesh T

Observing Kilimanoor | Ratheesh T

e-flux Journal

South Indian artist Ratheesh T’s practice of looking centers objects, spaces, and people, including his family in his hometown of Kilimanoor, a small town in Trivandrum, Kerala. Here we begin to peel away the layers of a “generative objective knowledge” of a place that forms the core of his work. Many of his paintings show family members and depict land, neighborhoods, and stories that have unfolded within a forty-mile radius of Kilimanoor. In effect, his paintings reveal the lives of his people and the place of his birth. However, Man and Doll (careless objects 2), a 2023 painting, turns Ratheesh T’s gaze inward.

The nuances that make a home | Abir Karmakar

The nuances that make a home | Abir Karmakar

by Ela Das for MidDay

The nuances that make a home

Walking into an Indian home can be a sensorial experience with the objects amassed by each family member symbolising a time capsule ripe with sentimental stories and vibrant memories. A dusting cloth placed to cover the top of every electronic device or old cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly above every cupboard betray tales of an owner’s personality, living habits and idiosyncrasies. While for some, sifting through generations of clutter within drawers or a store room is akin to an archaeological excavation; for the common man, these pieces bring together an idea of home. Exploring this familiar domestic imagery of Indian homes, Baroda-based artist Abir Karmakar’s larger-than-life, photorealistic paintings spotlight the social and temporal quirks of modern India.

Mumbai: Abul Hisham’s second solo, ‘Recitation,’ at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

Mumbai: Abul Hisham’s second solo, ‘Recitation,’ at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

By Shaikh Ayaz I Architectural Digest

April 22, 2019

The show is a visceral ode to the artist's Islamic heritage, Spanish master Francisco de Goya's majestic gloom, and the beauty of Mughal miniatures.

ALTERNATIVE TRUTH

ALTERNATIVE TRUTH

by Ravish Kumar

Abir Karmakar: Interpreting the Object World

Abir Karmakar: Interpreting the Object World

by Gayatri Sinha for Critical Collective

It is with the exhibition “Passage” that Abir Karmakar’s obsessive interest in interiority marks a point of definition.

THE PAST AND ITS SHADOWS

THE PAST AND ITS SHADOWS

by Neha Mitra for Art India

From the 12th of January to the 9th of March, Mumbai's Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke hosted seekrajan, a retrospective of more than 30 years of work by CK Rajan.

 

The lived realities in Aban Raza’s art

The lived realities in Aban Raza’s art

Arushi Vats for Frontline

The lived realities in Aban Raza’s art

Her emphatically social paintings make us see the “invisible” people whose labour fuels the economy.

Aban Raza’s solo exhibition of large-format oil paintings is dominated by bodies—bodies bearing the charge of dissent, bodies engaged in constant labour, and the invisible but ever-present body of the Constitution as a site of contestation. Running from November 3 until December 28 at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai, Raza’s show, titled “There is Something Tremendous About the Blue Sky”, serves as a memory log of the events that have marked public life in India in the past two years, charting both the excesses and assaults of the state and the widespread civic eruptions that challenged these. Nestled between the great events are ordinary moments, depicted through train journeys, construction work, or the after-hours of a wedding celebration. Made between 2020 and 2022, the period darkened by the COVID-19 pandemic, the paintings are marked by a refreshing publicness; they look outward and are consistently social, drawing attention to those who could not afford to retreat into safety in the fractured republic.

Postcards from the Pandemic

Postcards from the Pandemic

Art India | Volume 26, Issue 2 | December 2022

Even though you enter Mumbai-based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke’s expansive new space with prior knowledge of the subject of Abir Karmakar’s show Everyday – mimetic chronicles of the doom and gloom wrought by the coronavirus pandemic – you are unprepared for the surge of emotions experienced on encountering the works physically. 

Everyday | Abir Karmakar

Everyday | Abir Karmakar

ARTFORUM, September 2022

Abir Karmakar's oil paintings use photorealism as a kind of abstraction. Drawing on photographs of now familiar pandemic scenes, the artist slows the viewer's recognition of the subject matter, so that municipal officials, hazmat suits, and yellow bags of medical waste appear first and foremost as luminous scrapes, licks, and dissolutions of paint. 

 

‘Woman is as Woman Does’: An ode to womanpower | Frontline

‘Woman is as Woman Does’: An ode to womanpower | Frontline

By Anupama Katakam

Mumbai’s iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) is celebrating its centenary this year. To celebrate the event along with the 75th year of Independence, an exhibition titled  Woman is as Woman Does, featuring 27 Indian women artists, opened at the museum on August 13 (August 13-October 16). Curated by art critic Nancy Adajania and showing at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation and Premchand Roychand Gallery of the museum, the exhibition is an immersive experience where the images reveal as much about India’s feminist movement as the texts accompanying them.

Ratheesh T. | Spotlight

Ratheesh T. | Spotlight

Brigid Uccia

Attributed to “magical realism”, Ratheesh T’s earlier paintings are surreal—often hypnotising—images of the mythological universe that informs the local culture he hails from. Interspersed with his personal iconography, his large-scale paintings are bold statements on social injustice and the marginalisation of the native inhabitants, who, as daily-wage earners, battle for survival and self-sustenance. ‘Allotted Land’ (2018) represents the intricate social fabric of village life in southern Kerala, ridden by poverty, manual labour, alcoholism as well as the betrayal by a political ideology which pledged social equality for all. Teeming with details, groups of figures and animals form various intersecting focal points, cohesively woven together into a singular picture plane. This “genre painting” of epic dimension suggests a deep sympathy with the “orphans of modernisation”, acutely observed by the artist “as if I was one of them”.

Sosa Joseph | Skye Arundhati Thomas

Sosa Joseph | Skye Arundhati Thomas

May 2022

Sosa Joseph has lived most of her life by the Pampa River in Kerala, India. The fourteen paintings in her exhibition “Where Do We Come From?” did not stray far from its paddy banks. Each was a flash of something Joseph has remembered, half recollections that have come to her in sudden bursts. In A Viper in the Sugar Cane Field, 2021, for instance, we saw a crowd walking down a towpath lined with tall sawtooth cane leaves. The scene is blurred, as though sliding away, caught only for a moment before it disappears; it is tinged with uncer-tainty. A figure in repose, head tilted back, is being carried to the choppy water. Behind them, a snake is wrapped around a slim pole and an almost-full moon blinks in the indigo. 

Sosa Joseph | My Family and Other Animals

Sosa Joseph | My Family and Other Animals

by Zeenat Nagree

January 13 - February 26

In much of Édouard Glissant's life and theoretical work, the archipelago occupied a central place, so much so that he used its geographical form to theorise a state of being and relation, which he termed "archipelagic thinking”. The concept locates Glissant as an island-dweller - he came from Martinique - and indicates how his experiences on the continent of Europe were oriented towards the environment in which he had spent the first 18 years of his life.

I am what moves me: Sosa Joseph | Mint

I am what moves me: Sosa Joseph | Mint

Avantika Bhuyan

What matters to me in a painting is painting; what’s vital is challenging myself as a painter,” artist Sosa Joseph had noted during a series of conversations with writer John Mathew in Kochi, Kerala, and Bengaluru between 2019-2021 “My only concerns, quests and considerations are formal and aesthetic; what is more important to me than what I paint is how I paint it.” This pretty much encapsulates the Kochi-based artist’s continuing commitment to the medium of painting, especially at a time when some of her contemporaries may have veered towards new media.

Sosa Joseph: Flow of Consciousness

Sosa Joseph: Flow of Consciousness

By Georgina Maddox | Art Dose

Taking it back to the Pamba River and to sights and sounds that she grew up with, Kerala-based artist Sosa Joseph’s latest works are a refreshing take on the ‘purpose’ of life.

 

Sosa Joseph returns to the Pamba River | Ocula Insight

Sosa Joseph returns to the Pamba River | Ocula Insight

By Sherry Paik

January 13 - February 26

Drawn from the riverside village of her childhood and early adulthood in Kerala, India, Sosa Joseph's paintings trace the origins of her life back to the river. Joseph grew up in the north of Parumala, a small town on the Pamba River, and activities and festivities associated with the river—from turtle hunting to luffa gathering—were a constant in her life before the artist left to study painting at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Rendered in the artist's characteristic, loose figurative style, 15 new canvases completed between 2019 and 2021 manifest Joseph's memories of home in Where do we come from? at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai (13 January–26 February 2022). 

Abul Hisham: Intertwining Socio-cultural Spaces with Personal Narratives

Abul Hisham: Intertwining Socio-cultural Spaces with Personal Narratives

Abul Hisham is a young and talented artist based in Thrissur, Kerala, who has done four solo shows and participated in several group shows both in India and abroad. After completing his BFA and masters in fine arts, he was awarded the prestigious Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2013. He was recently selected for the art residency programme at Rijksakademie van Beeldente Kunsten (2021), Amsterdam, the Netherlands; earlier he was awarded residencies at Skowhegan Artist Residency, Maine, USA in 2019, and at “What About Art” (WAA), Mumbai, in collaboration with Inlaks India Foundation and Harmony Art Residency, Mumbai, by Reliance India Foundation, 2015. His body of work explores the notions of desire, death and memory, and how they intertwine with the social and cultural spaces and his own personal narratives. 

Benitha Perciyal, Critical Collective, Amrita Gupta Singh, raw materials, coconut, resin, wood, frankincense, raw banana fibre, minimalism, minimalist abstraction, Arte Povera

Memory, Materiality, Sediment: Benitha Perciyal

Amrita Gupta Singh, Critical Collective

August 26, 2019

An alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai, Perciyal trained in painting (BFA) and printmaking (MFA) and progressed to self-portraiture, conceptual installations, and found assemblages after she received a junior research grant to work at the Lalit Kala Studios in Chennai. Through printmaking, she discovered the qualities of surface, texture, and positive/negative space, which expanded to three dimensional work employing the corporeality of touch. Her transversal practice comes forth in her solo exhibition, Aggregate at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (August 8- October 15, 2019), firmly embedded in figurative and representational forms, and also exploring minimalist abstraction.

TRANSFORMING MEMORY - Benitha Perciyal

TRANSFORMING MEMORY - Benitha Perciyal

Live Mint | Arjun Mahatta

Benitha Perciyal's sculptures build on the qualities of her material. And for her first solo show in Mumbai, Aggregate, she wil exhibit a new body of work featuring materials such as reused Burma teak, tree resin and African tulip seeds. 

 Jackson Pollock, FN Souza, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, P. R. Satheesh FRENETIC, ARTFORUM Critics' Picks, Zeenat Nagree

ARTFORUM, Critics' Picks — P.R. Satheesh "FRENETIC"

Zeenat Nagree, ARTFORUM

November, 2019

Eyes—alert and alarmed—pop out of P. R. Satheesh's paintings. Their gazes evoke the aftermath of a tense encounter, its charge still lingering. With this focus on the ocular, and the interplay of consciousness it suggests, the differences between Satheesh's subjects—be they human, fish, or insect—seem not to matter. They all appear troubled or shocked, much like the men and women who bare their teeth in F. N. Souza's paintings, here jostling for space in dense compositions made between 2014 and 2019.

PR Satheesh, gestural abstraction, Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism, pen and ink drawings, Indian ink on paper

Memories of a Home

Dipti Nagpaul, Indian Express

November 5, 2019

Kerala-based artist P.R. Satheesh focusses on his bond with nature throught 'abstract landscapes'

Thus spake memory | Benitha Perciyal

Thus spake memory | Benitha Perciyal

Mumbai Mirror

In the central room of the commodious Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke _ currently, the venue for Chennai-based artist Benitha Perciyal's show, Aggregate - is a circular wall-mounted sculpture created out of raw banana fibre. Five-feet wide across the diameter, the sculpture titled, "What Am I looking For?" signifies the earth element. It's one of four open-mouthed, papier-mâché containers that the artist has used to represent the four elements: earth, air, fire and water.

Paper City and Ghost Modernity: In Conversation with Ranjana Steinruecke

Paper City and Ghost Modernity: In Conversation with Ranjana Steinruecke

Art Fervor

Contemporary Indian artist Manish Nai has a rather unique artistic style. He often works with found and discarded objects- recycling old clothes and newspapers, compressing books and various kinds of fabric- transforming them into sculptural pieces that are both overwhelming and playfully nostalgic. His practice finds new forms for old objects through remolding by twisting, cutting, and folding, and abstracting the material to create something new.

Ratheesh T., realism, oil on canvas, environmental art, Kerala, Trivandrum, Malayali, communism, rice flour, coconut

The Artist and his Backyard

Anuj Daga, ARTIndia Magazine

December, 2018

Ratheesh T.'s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community.

Against Waste | Manish Nai

Against Waste | Manish Nai

by Lajja Shah for Art India

Lajja Shah feels that Manish Nai's works, made of recycled material, industrial detritus and everyday objects, frame a statement against hyper-consumerism.

Life is Long, Indian Art is Cheap

Life is Long, Indian Art is Cheap

Richard C. Morais (Barron Penta Editior)

September 28, 2018

A few years ago, Henry Kaufman, the fabled economist formerly at Salomon Brothers, told me in his crusty German accent that "much in financila markets and life is comparative". 

At Home in a Gallery

At Home in a Gallery

Review, ARTIndia, The Season, March 2018

March 2018

Girish Shahane steps into Abir Karmakar's house of illusions. 

Abir Karmakar's contribution to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 spread across the Kashi Art Gallery, a repurposed old Portuguese house not interesting enough architecturally to quality for the 'heritage' label.  

Landscapes of memory

Landscapes of memory

by Tejal Pandey

Dutch-Indian artist Aji V.N’s ongoing show is a multi-faceted journey that explores unknown worlds that reside within

Deep Dark Interiors

Deep Dark Interiors

by Tasneem Mehta for Art India

In Gieve Patel’s new exhibition, you can see the vulnerable figure on the sidelines of society

In Gieve Patel’s new exhibition, you can see the vulnerable figure on the sidelines of society

by Ranjit Hoskote for Scroll.in

“The city like a passion burns.
He dreams of morning walks, alone, And floating on a wave of sand.
But still his mind its traffic turns Away from beach and tree and stone To kindred clamour close at hand.”

— Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Urban’ [1]

Footboard Rider: Of Life and Death in Gieve Patel’s Art

Footboard Rider: Of Life and Death in Gieve Patel’s Art

BY Alpana Sawai for The Wire

A conversation with the artist Gieve Patel cannot be limited to referencing his art. The rigour with which his work has celebrated and delineated the human condition over decades, the effortless way in which death has been made meaningful – not sensational or gratuitous – and his own wonder at what that last journey might involve...these ideas dominate a Sunday morning meeting with the painter, poet, playwright and physician at his Cusrow Baug residence in Mumbai.

Gieve Patel’s latest show is a complex study of the human form

Gieve Patel’s latest show is a complex study of the human form

By Avantika Shankar for AD

Patel's work is unmistakable for his use of colour—saturated with pastels, his paintings often feature a solitary element that deliberately stands out in contrast. We are to consider, when observing his work, the very process of looking, and the nature of perception.

THE TREE OF LIFE | ART INDIA

THE TREE OF LIFE | ART INDIA

Men, women, animals and freaks constitute Siji Krishnan’s family, notes Lajja Shah

Two simultaneous impulses take over the moment one encounters Sifi Krishnan's watercolours: the compelling need to zoom in up close to observe the minute details and the urge to pull back and absorb their panoramic scale. These photographic/ cinematographic motions continue to be at play as one views The Family Portrait, the Kochi-based artist's solo at Mumbai's Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke from the 12th of August to the 29th of October.

Freaks and geeks: Everyone finds a place in Siji Krishnan's family portraits

Freaks and geeks: Everyone finds a place in Siji Krishnan's family portraits

Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri | Scroll.in

Siji Krishnan's concept of family goes beyond the nuclear, or a shared last name.

In The Family Portrait, Krishnan explores the family get-togethers of her childhood from Kerala, capturing generations within a single frame. Drawn with watercolours on rice paper, each family portrait is inspired by Mavelikkara in Kerala's Alappuzha district, where Krishnan drew imaginary worlds in her head while listening to her grandmother's stories.

ART AROUND THE CORNER - Home is where the art is

ART AROUND THE CORNER - Home is where the art is

by Reema Gehi for Mumbai Mirror

When people often ask Gieve Patel if he paints in his bed room, his reply to them is always, “No, I sleep in my studio,“ smiles the 76-year-old. Located inside an old building in the heart of busy Colaba, where Patel also lives, the studio is a synonym of a peaceful haven. The artist also paints out of another space in Nepean Sea Road, “and there is no restriction; it's quite fluid,“ he says. “Though I like the high ceilings here. It gives the room the spaciousness.“

Indian Satire: Mining the traditions of the political cartoon

Indian Satire: Mining the traditions of the political cartoon

Shanay Jhaveri, frieze magazine

March 18, 2015

Having trained as a painter at Maharaja Sayajirao University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, Rajan became one of the youngest members of the highly politicized but short-lived group, the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Active from 1985 to ’89, the group aggressively rejected the narrative tendency of earlier Indian artists.

ODE OT THE WHIRRING FAN | Art India

ODE OT THE WHIRRING FAN | Art India

Machines and movements coupled with their sounds allow Surabhi Saraf window into the choreographies of everyday life, claims Sandhya Bordewekar.

Surabhi Sara studied Painting at Baroda (2005) and tAr and Technology ta hte Atr Institute of Chicago (2009). She si also atrained classical Hindustani vocalist. Saraf brings ti al together - visual images, experimental and classical sounds, technology and choreography - to create video and performance works that have won her a bouquet of international awards over the last few vears (Eureka Fellowship 2015; Nomination for SECA Award ta San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2014; Winner, Experimental Film Category ta Disposable Film Festival, San Francisco 2012; Winner, Celeste Prize (Video & Animation), Italy 2009; Peers Students Residency at Khoi International. Delhi 2008; Nasreen Mohamed Award at the Faculty fo Fine Arts, Baroda 2006; among others)

Tall Tales | Abul Hisham

Tall Tales | Abul Hisham

Verve Magazine | Text by Sitanshi Talati Parikh

Satirical collages and metaphors make for descriptive storytelling in Abul Hisham's new works showing in Mumbai

Street Theatre

Street Theatre

Sanjukta Sharma, Live Mint

March 22, 2014

Everyday scenes from Kerala through the sophisticated painterly eye of Sosa Joseph

MATTERS OF THE FAITHFUL HEART

MATTERS OF THE FAITHFUL HEART

by Sushma Sabnis for ArtNDeal

While Mumbai's India Art Festival 2013 saw the participation of several galleries from the country, two elegant art galeries from Mumbai, Sakshi Galery and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke have chosen to specifically focus and display the exquisite works of two renowned artists for the eagerly awaited India Art Fair 2014 at New Delhi, reports Sushma Sabnis

The power of three

The power of three

by Phalguni Desai for Timeout Mumbai

A meditation on process and implicit faith coheres Baroda-based artist Arun KS' first solo showing, Drama of the Analyzed and the Analyzer. It's populated with triptychs, flanked by panels of concrete and wax. The monochromatic triptychs reveal hundreds of hazy figures almost peeping out of sacrificial smoke. The suggestion is in tune with Arun's questions of existing within a single ideological construct.

One for the Art Frat | Nicola Durvasula

One for the Art Frat | Nicola Durvasula

Mumbai Mirror

October 16, 2012

British artist Nicola Durvasula, who is exhibiting her work in the city after four years, presents I Am Here at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke. The show, curated by Grant Watson, comprises intricate figure drawings on paper, and small sculp-tures. 

I Am Here | Nicola Durvasula

I Am Here | Nicola Durvasula

OCULA

October 12, 2012

I Am Here, a solo exhibition of work by Nicola Durvasula. Almost a mini retrospective, I Am Here presents a range of material including witty polemical and conceptual works on paper, intricate and highly accomplished figure drawings, and a range of small sculptures, which reveal the artist’s often absurd sensibility and poetic imagination.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER | ART INDIA

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER | ART INDIA

by Zeenat Nagree

The grief-stricken Ophelia - modelled after John Everett Millais's lush painting featuring the Shakespearean heroine who loses her father, Polonius and her love, Hamlet - comes across as Siji Krishnan's alter ego in 0 + 0 = 0 (my father's mathematics). We see her as she floats in a dark pool, about to sink into its murky depths. Krishnan borrows Ophelia's sorrow to express her own. The 29-year-old Hyderabad-based artist's preoccupation with her father's death drives this exhibition of paintings mounted at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 10th of August to the 29th of September.

Remembering loved ones through art | Siji Krishnan

Remembering loved ones through art | Siji Krishnan

The Times of India | Meghna Mukherjee

In her Mumbai debut, Hyderabad based painter Siji R Krishnan explores the loss of a loved one.

Stopped in their Tracks

Stopped in their Tracks

Anamika Mukharji, SUNDAY Business Standard

September 26, 2010

Artists C.K. Rajan and Bani Abidi explore stillness and chaos 

 

Object Lessons

Object Lessons

Review, ARTIndia, Volume XV, Issue II

September, 2010

Srimoyee Mitra looks at how CK Rajan re-invents household articles to speak about social, political and cultural transformations in a changing world.

Textures of Silence

Textures of Silence

by Amrita Gupta-Singh for Art India

The starkness of Manish Nai's work is a response to the abiding culture of excess, suggests Amrita Gupta-Singh.

Beyond Control, Indian Express

Beyond Control, Indian Express

Documenta artist CKRajan infuses madness ni household objects for his latest solo show

DEFORMED objects, ripped off their utility, discover new meanings in the art world. CK Rajan, Hyberabad-based artist, makes that happen with his latest solo exhibition Mad Furnitures and Psychic Objects at Galerie Mir-chandani + Steinruecke, Colaba.

"The Common" Sosa Joseph

"The Common" Sosa Joseph

Kamala Kapoor

October 6 — November 12, 2009

While some of Kerala based Sosa Joseph’s varied art works – pastels, watercolors, oils and pencil – mine the possibilities inherent in realistic evocations, others attempt the same with evocative abstractions. One can wander through her small and large format paintings, their relatively spare images, refreshingly at odds with those loaded with frenzy or ambiguity, in what often passes for profundity in the conceptual claustrophobia of a great deal of current art practice.

Queer Canvas | Alternative sexuality in art has been often subject to censorship

Queer Canvas | Alternative sexuality in art has been often subject to censorship

The Indian Express by Georgina Maddox

"Painter Abir Karmakar's 'transgressive eroticism' is certainly provocative but more subtly it is aesthetically provocative. It's not so much the seductive nakedness of the body that is starling in Karmakar's In the Old Fashioned Way but the lowly position Karmakar put it in," says Donald Kuspit. Karmakar is an artist who explores his feminine side through photorealistic work evoking the living environs of the global citizen.

Whispers of Fragility

Whispers of Fragility

The Art News Magazine of India, Volume XIII

March 2009

Whispers of Fragility 

The lack of variation in Nicola Durvasula's works threatens to create monotonous worlds, observes Veena Kelkar.

Seeing red and lines

Seeing red and lines

by Ramya Sarma for DNA Mumbai

Three artists feature in a show at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke: Reena Saini Kallat, Nicola Durvasula and CK Rajan. They present a study in contrasts, yet 'match' perfectly together as the exhibition flows through the space. As Ranjana Steinruecke of the gallery says, sometimes things that have no connection work well together.

Moving Earth

Moving Earth

Time Out Mumbai

Surreal, twisted and often disturbing, Ratheesh T's new works are full of violence, despair and darkness. Blood streams through the intricate streets. Krishnas, Jesuses and mosques stand with beatific expressions while innocents are hunted and killed. A carpenter with a distinct resemblance to Ratheesh himself lies on a crate marked fragile, in the precise pose as that of an old skeleton near him. 

Terror -Struck

Terror -Struck

Verve

There is no disputing the fact ha Ratheesh T's paintings are born out of an unlikely alliance between the picturesque landscapes and bustling townscapes of his native Kerala - for the tension between tradition and modernity is palpable in the concerns he explores. Environmental degradation and social instability are evidentlv major issues that disturb him and his hyper-realistic paintings place them centerstage through the juxtaposition of unrelated backdrops and colourful characters in his dramatic compositions.

Walking Through the Expanded Miniatures

Walking Through the Expanded Miniatures

by Johny ML for Artconcerns.com

Aji VN’s latest solo show at the Mirchandani+ Steinruecke Gallery, Mumbai brings back a lot of sepia toned and black and white memories. Here is an artist who has shifted his original location and found a home in foreign lands. However, it does not seem that the change in the locale has shifted the context of his art production. Aji places/produces his works in the context of a rigorous journey, a journey undertaken for the pleasure of it.

Engendering a new art form

Engendering a new art form

by Shreevatsa Nevatia for Hindustan Times

GENDER EXPERIMENTS are in vogue for a host of visual artists. Their art, which is often referred to as a feminist statement, seeks to challenge the stereotypical binary construction of male and female and draws inspiration from many a source - be it mythology, history or even, the absurd.

feminine mystique | Better Interiors

feminine mystique | Better Interiors

His Other Self | Abir Karmakar

Abir Karmakar, a young artist discovered by Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, presented a startling suite of 12 oils on canvas that depict his existential quest through androgynous self-portraits with ambivalent sexual identity.

 

Artist Abir Karmakar explores his feminine 'other' in works that question ideas of masculinity

Artist Abir Karmakar explores his feminine 'other' in works that question ideas of masculinity

by Shrimoyee Mitra for Indian Express

A SEXY woman in a black dress and tights looks straight into your eyes, her red lips and nails adding to the sensuousness. At first glance, it s impossible to tell that the woman in the painting is actually a man. And that is exactly what artist Abir Kar-makar hopes to do with his first solo show From My Photo Album, opening on October S at the Museum Art Gallery blur boundaries and question perceived notions of the masculine and feminine.

STRIKE A POSE

STRIKE A POSE

by Nandini Ramnath for Time Out Mumbai

It isn't a photograph. Nor is it a depiction of Kate Moss after one line too many. The image below is of a painting by a 28-year-old artist with a penchant for slipping himself into the frame and testing the boundaries of representation. Abir Kar-makar's paintings are alluring (and often erotic) snapshots of an androgynous male - meant to represent the artist himself - in various poses in posh, Westernised interi-ors, the kinds seen in fashion catalogues.

International Reviews: Bhupen Khakhar

International Reviews: Bhupen Khakhar

Laurie A. Stein, ARTNews

September 1998

A master storyteller, Bhupen Khakhar is regarded in his native country and internationally as one of the most important Indian artists of the last 30 years. Although noted for a pictorial language that is deliberately hybrid—a mix of Indian folk-art traditions and modern European realism, sex and religion, modesty and flamboyance—Khakhar is most commonly lauded for pioneering a new contect for homosexuality in Indian art. 

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